


tonight, tonight the highway’s bright

by greatunironic



Series: starting from zero, got nothing to lose [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Friendship, Identity Reveal, M/M, Street Racing, anakin skywalker: human trashcan fire, the fast + the furious au no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25791181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greatunironic/pseuds/greatunironic
Summary: “Anakin, handcuffed to the interrogation table, glared at the one-way glass and desperately tried to remember any of the shit Padmé would say when they’d get stoned and watchLaw and Orderreruns on USA.”
Relationships: Jango Fett/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Series: starting from zero, got nothing to lose [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848370
Comments: 54
Kudos: 220





	tonight, tonight the highway’s bright

> For all the shut-down strangers,  
>  And hot rod angels,  
>  Rumbling through this promised land —  
>  Tonight my baby and me,  
>  We’re gonna ride to the sea,  
>  And wash these sins off our hands.
> 
> — Bruce Springsteen, “Racing in the Street”

Shmi Skywalker had been a genius with a V6. She’d never been particularly taken with the racing scene — long disdainful of it’s more misogynistic members, and the criminal element — but she’d been so talented and knew her way around a NOS like any seasoned pro that she’d ended up on the fringes anyway. The little garage that Watto had run, that she’d worked out of, would get a few guys stopping by every once in a while, especially after word got out that Shmi had helped out Mace Windu on his ride once after a battle. 

Anakin had learned at his mother’s knee in Watto’s garage; she’d been a single mom in an expensive city, and Watto had only ever cared that Mom was getting the work done and bringing in cash. It didn’t matter if she had an infant strapped to her chest or, later, that Anakin would post up in the corner, supposedly doing homework but really watching Mom strip an engine and rebuild it.

As he got older and started helping out around the garage, he had idolized the flashy, cool guys with their tricked out rides that would come to see if she’d look over their car. She’d done her best to keep him away from them — sent him on errands if she’d known they were coming around, made him do schoolwork in the office, kept him busy on a practice engine of his own. She’d wanted better for him than the life she had — even as a little kid, he’d been smart with numbers and brilliant at fixing things. Mom had a dream for him, and it was CalTech and a career and a life as a proper engineer, maybe one at Lockheed or even JPL. She didn’t want him in a mechanic’s garage, rebuilding car engines, and drag racing in the streets.

It had looked like a real possibility, too, even after her contract got put up as part of Watto’s debt at a race. Mace Windu had won it, and Obi-Wan Kenobi had ensured it stayed with him; and if there was any shop that had connections to the scene but a bright future, it was Windu’s. Obi-Wan had helped make it respectable with that posh accent of his and elbow-patched sweaters — once the teenage fight club scene was behind him — and Windu would leave it to him someday when he went to retire. And Windu had never cared if his foster kids loved the sport or not: Depa, a talented racer in her own right, had decided to go off to NYU for a business degree and ended up running old man Yoda's vineyard up north; and Obi-Wan refused to get behind to wheel of a car unless he absolutely had to. For all his cold demeanor, Mace Windu had only ever cared that his kids were happy.

When Mom got sick, that was why she’d written Windu into her will, asked him to look after Anakin. She’d trusted him to make sure that Anakin had the same bright future that Depa and Obi-Wan had set out before them. It was just too bad that Anakin had never wanted that future, not without her, and that when she was gone, and Windu was trying to do right by Anakin, he’d wanted no part of it.

If there was a heaven, Anakin knew Shmi Skywalker was there, tuning up engines — and looking down at her son, shaking her head and sighing, wondering what the fuck had gone wrong.

Anakin wasn’t sleeping.

It had been almost a month since Anakin stood in the shadows of Windu’s office and listened to him and Obi-Wan trying to figure out how someone had planned the same intricate and specific highway heist that Obi-Wan had. He’d listened to them go back and forth, growing more and more sick to his stomach with shame, before he’d gone back into the shop proper, slid beneath the shitty, broke down ‘04 Civic Māhoe brought in, and tried to take his mind off it with an engine and grease.

It would blow over, he told himself, staring up into the dark of the undercarriage. It would blow over, and the heists would end or the guys who were doing it would get caught and it would never make its way back to Windu’s Café and Autobody.

But he couldn’t sleep.

Most nights now, after he and Obi-Wan punched out and grabbed dinner either together or with the crew at the shop, they’d hop into Anakin’s Skyline and drive back to Obi-Wan’s house down on the beach near the edge of Marina Del Rey and the inlet. They’d sit on the back porch, feet up on the railings, staring out at the ocean, and drinking a beer — Anakin — and tea — Obi-Wan. Anakin would say goodnight around ten, call Padmé to talk about her day, and then he’d lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. He’d listen to Obi-Wan moving though his little bungalow, floorboards creaking beneath his feet as he went from room to room: porch to kitchen to bathroom, cleaning out his mug and brushing his teeth, and then finally down the hall to his own bedroom. Anakin would sleep in fits and starts and then the next morning, he’d already be at the kitchen table when Obi-Wan walked in, one eyebrow raised.

Some nights he would go to Padmé’s instead, watch some TV and fall into bed. Those were the nights that he got the best sleep, but midterms were approaching for fall and Padmé was getting busier with office hours and her own tests and papers, so those nights were about to become a thing of the past.

Now, this particular night, Anakin’s table lamp was still on as Obi-Wan walked past. Anakin could hear his steps slow and stop. He sat up. He counted to ten in his head and —

There was a knock on the closed door.

“Yeah,” Anakin called.

The door opened, and Obi-Wan leaned his shoulder against the frame.

“You’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he said.

“Yeah,” Anakin said again, lying down to stare at the ceiling some more.

Obi-Wan sighed. “Would you like me to make you some tea? Don’t make that face.”

“You can’t see my face.”

“I know it’s happening,” he said. “It would help.”

“If I wanna drink grass water,” Anakin said, “I’ll go get some clippings from Windu’s garden and boil them myself, thanks.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Obi-Wan. Anakin couldn’t fault him: he was, in the end, tragically British and had a deep attachment to the tea his late uncle used to drink. He didn’t even think Obi-Wan really liked it himself — he only drank about half a cup at night, while he went through at least two pots of Earl Grey every day — but Anakin wouldn’t say anything; he still choked back blueberries anytime he saw them, even if he thought the texture was horrible, just because they’d been Mom’s favorite.

Obi-Wan didn’t often talk about his uncle. The things Anakin knew about him were few and far between, snippets here and there about the man who’d raised Obi-Wan after his mother was out of the picture. He knew he was English, that he liked tea and had been a painter, and that he’d died in a car accident when Obi-Wan was a little younger than Anakin was when Mom died; and he was pretty sure he was only told these things because he was a fucking holy terror after Mom and Obi-Wan had been trying to relate to him. He didn’t even know the man’s name.

“Thanks for the offer,” he said, “but it’s gonna be a hard pass.”

“Suit yourself,” Obi-Wan said. After a moment, he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” 

Anakin, who had on more than one occasion entered a room accompanied by a loud announcement regarding how he was feeling, wanted nothing more than to talk about it. He wanted to throw himself at Obi-Wan’s feet and beg for mercy and advice and forgiveness. He wanted to break down the door to Palpatine’s garage and demand they stop. He wanted to know how he could fix this. 

He sat up on his elbows instead and said, skeptically, “Are you willingly offering to talk about feelings and shit with me? The last time we did that it was because I had that weird meltdown on Space Mountain and started crying in public. That was five years ago. Are we due for another?”

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes.

“Anyway, I just can’t sleep. I’m fine,” said Anakin and, at Obi-Wan’s raised eyebrow, quickly searched for something he could say that wasn’t the truth. For all that Anakin loved to talk about his feelings and Obi-Wan loved to pretend that he didn’t have any, Obi-Wan was the one who was actually equipped to identify them in other people and would awkwardly attempt to talk to people about them. 

“Just haven’t raced in a while,” he told him, which wasn’t even really a lie at all — Anakin usually tried to find a battle once a month and just dragged against one of the crew in the shop at least twice a week, especially if someone was tuning up a new ride, but they’d been keeping a very low profile the last month and he unfortunately hadn’t gone out the week before everything went down. He’d be getting antsy even if he wasn’t afraid he’d just condemned him and Obi-Wan to a future that involved the phrase _twenty-five to life._

“I know Mace doesn’t want us drawing attention to ourselves with all this business with the police and those robberies, but maybe Quinlan will go out with you tomorrow night,” offered Obi-Wan. “You two do so love risking your lives on the PCH when given half the chance.”

“That’s true,” he said, smiling. There was something very soothing about racing up through Santa Monica and towards Malibu in Vos’s baby girl; Anakin would even settle with being in the passenger seat the whole time, if Vos put the ragtop down and took those hairpin turns at a truly insane clip.

Obi-Wan smiled too. “There now. Think you can sleep, dreaming of defying death and traffic laws on the 1?”

“Yeah,” Anakin said. He didn’t honestly think that would do the trick but he’d at least try, for Obi-Wan.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Goodnight, Anakin.”

“Night.”

He smiled one more time and stepped away, shutting the door softly behind him.

Anakin listened to Obi-Wan’s footsteps retreating and his bedroom door shutting. He flopped backwards into the bed.

“Jesus Christ,” he said quietly to himself.

Maybe going for a ride with Vos would truly help — Vos was one of the biggest gossips around, and almost always had the hook up on the juiciest secrets of the scene. He’d probably have something that would help Anakin decide what to do.

He wondered if he should ask Padmé for advice. She would probably be able to help him figure out what he should do, and he tried to imagine how the conversation would go in his head. He would invite her out for coffee at that bougie place she liked down on Melrose and they’d get affogatos or something and he’d tell her about that year after Mom died, how he’d fallen in with a bad crowd at a rival shop and had done something stupid to impress them. And now his bullshit had come home to roost, and it could cost them everything, send both him and Obi-Wan to jail if the guys got caught and they told the cops who had come up with the idea for the heists in the first place.

He could imagine the frown on Padmé’s pretty face as he told her the story. He could imagine her pulling her phone out to take notes, the way she’d turn her head to the side just so as she thought. She would chew the inside of her mouth, like she always did when she was thinking hard, and she’d say something like, “Rabé just did this case study for clinic,” and she’d tell him about that case and how it related to what he’d gotten mixed up with. She’d reach her hand out, cover his with hers, and tell him not to worry. She would take care of it.

 _One problem, chief,_ he thought to himself. One pretty big one, as a matter of fact:

Padmé didn’t know about that part of Anakin’s life. 

She knew he worked at a mechanic’s shop and that his boss and some time foster dad had long ago been involved in the illegal street racing scene. She knew that Anakin and his friends liked to work on their cars, and liked to race each other in their freetime — Anakin just kind of, sort of neglected to let her know that he also raced people outside the shop, and that it was often for bags of cash and sometimes drugs and the occasional pink slip.

Anakin wasn’t big on the drug stuff; it was the one area of the scene Windu had always put his foot down on and, after seeing Obi-Wan’s brief flirtation with pills after his accident five years ago, Anakin was, for once, more than happy to let Windu set the rules on something.

He wanted to tell Padmé, he really did. He just didn’t know how to: they’d been together for three years now, and Anakin wasn’t exactly sure how to raise the subject. He didn’t think of not telling her as lying, even if Obi-Wan would frown expansively at him when he’d catch Anakin making up a reason for why he couldn’t go out one night when he was actually going to battle. It was more a lie of omission, or maybe just something he forgot to mention.

Groaning quietly, he pulled a pillow over his head.

It just figured. There were two people in the entire world that he desperately wanted to turn to on this, and both of them would never talk to him again if he did. Padmé would hate him for lying and break up with him, and Obi-Wan would be so hugely disappointed and upset with him for betraying his trust and risking them all. 

Maybe he could call Depa. She always gave great advice and knew more about the scene than anyone ever gave her credit for. Worst case scenario, too, Yoda would probably have some trick up his sleeve for this kind of thing. The old man had had a gnarled finger in everything, even up to the end —

But both of them would probably figure out why he was asking, and word would get back to Windu and Obi-Wan, and everything would still go pear-shaped for him. He was going to have to go it alone.

Anakin pulled the pillow off his face.

 _Huh,_ he thought. 

Going it alone — now that might not necessarily be a terrible idea. People thought Anakin was kind of an idiot at the best of times — hazard of growing up in the shadows of Obi-Wan and Depa, each too clever by half, and of having a girlfriend as smart as Padmé, people really took him being the stupid one to heart. He’d never minded. He’d honestly always sort of liked it that way. It meant that people usually underestimated him, which led to him crushing a race, and often people would talk around him like he was a piece of furniture. Anakin probably had heard more gossip than even Vos; it was just that he usually didn’t care about it and forgot half of what he heard.

He could do this. He could ask around, and listen, and figure out who Palpatine had told the plan to. And then — well, he wasn’t sure what part two would be, but Anakin wasn’t the best street racer in Los Angeles just by luck. He’d figure it out.

It was another couple weeks before Anakin and the rest of Windu’s Café and Autobody were off their parole and found their way to a battle. The cops had let up sniffing around, as far as Anakin could tell, with no heist since the one that precipitated Windu and Obi-Wan’s hushed conversation in the office, and Obi-Wan had said something about how the other garages would start to get suspicious if none of them hit up a race soon.

Anakin had practically whooped with joy when Obi-Wan said that, and half the shop started high-giving each other. Even the typically very reserved Adi Gallia had rolled out from underneath a car to sigh loudly and say, “About goddamn time.”

Vos asked around a little and two days after Windu had acquiesced, the best organizer in the city, Dex, had put together a race outside of Long Beach and now Anakin, Vos, Fisto, Plo, and Adi were all crowded around Anakin’s Skyline R34 GT-R and watching the competition get set up. Obi-Wan was bent over the open engine, checking on the NOS tanks.

He was so excited, Anakin was practically vibrating. Since he started officially racing at sixteen, not just sneaking out and borrowing a car liked he’d done once or twice, but with a real learner’s permit in hand and Mace Windu long-suffering in the passenger seat at Mom’s behest, he’d never gone this long without getting behind the wheel for a battle.

His blue and silver ‘02 Skyline had been with him practically since the beginning. He’d bought it mad cheap from a scrapyard right before Mom got diagnosed, using all the savings he’d put aside from working under the table at Windu’s, and spent long hours beneath the hood fixing it up. It took him two years to get it where he wanted it, working by himself late at night after school and then after hours when he graduated, Obi-Wan occasionally pitching in and helping to install the NOS system. He called it R2-D2, after Plo’s youngest, Ahsoka, all of nine at the time, misheard the make and model and the name stuck.

“How’s my boy looking?” asked Anakin.

“As well maintained as ever,” said Obi-Wan. He didn’t bother to surface, just raising his voice to be heard. “I suspect you’ve been spending some of your sleepless nights in my garage with him?”

“Of course,” he said. “No one understands me like R2.”

Anakin didn’t need to see him to know Obi-Wan was rolling his eyes.

“Of course,” he parroted.

“Drallig’s Eclipse is looking good,” Adi Gallia was saying. “Is he up tonight?”

“No,” said Vos. “Dex said it’ll be Tiin from Republic tonight, Māhoe, and some guy from Empire, I think, whose name I don’t know.”

“Māhoe?” asked Fisto, shooting a grin towards Obi-Wan, who was either oblivious or ignoring them, or possibly both. “Doesn’t he drive a pick-up?”

“He has an Impreza too, I think,” said Plo. “But I heard Mace tell him to use that Civic he and Anakin have been working on instead. Is it road worthy yet?”

“Yeah,” said Anakin, “but if that’s what he chooses for tonight, he might as well just give me his money and go home. It’ll get to the finish line but, like, God, at what cost?”

“You think it’ll blow?” asked Fisto.

“Almost definitely,” he said.

“Wonder what Windu’s thinking,” commented Adi.

“Man, who knows?”

“What’s Tiin driving these days?” asked Vos. “His Lancer got dragged straight to hell last year when he had that blow out in the desert, and I don’t remember him racing since.”

“No idea,” said Adi. “I see Luminara over there, though. I’ll go see if she’s got the hook up.”

Fisto smoothed his braids back over his shoulders and smirked, teeth flashing bright white against his dark skin. “I’ll go with you.”

They slipped off through the crowd. 

From beneath the hood, Obi-Wan finally emerged. There was oil smeared across one of his cheeks but none on his sweater vest. He said, “That woman will eat Kit alive.”

“I think that’s what he’s going for, Obi-Wan,” said Plo, wry.

“I’m going to go ask around about the other driver,” said Anakin. “The one from Empire. Wanna know who I’m up against.”

There was an informal layout to the way everyone parked at the battles — at least, for the usual suspects. Windu’s crew was often parked in the middle of the action, despite sometimes being one of the last groups to arrive. Republic would be across the way from them, if they were parked between two warehouses for the starting line like they were tonight, or they’d be closer to the front if they needed to line up; drivers from Temple used to park next to them, but the new management frowned on the scene, apparently, and all the good mechanics from Temple had jumped ship right after Yoda sold the place anyway. Empire usually hung out towards the back — they were always a little stand-offish with other racers, tended to keep to themselves, especially because Palpatine reportedly frowned on the scene. Other racers and drivers would come with their cars and fill out the spaces in between them all and then further forward too, lining the street they’d race along, showing off their rides and checking out everyone else’s.

Anakin headed back towards Empire’s spot. He was recognizable in the scene — it would be hard not to be, with his pedigree, Shmi Skywalker as his mother and Mace Windu as his foster father; to say nothing of his own skills — so he was stopped pretty often on the way. He’d just made it to the edges of the group surrounding Empire’s crew — he could see Asaji Ventress’s distinctive bald, tattooed head just above the crowd, and possibly one of the Opress brothers — when a Civic pulled up next to him.

He sent a casual, curious glance at it and then double-taked. It was, indeed, the Civic he’d been working on with Māhoe.

“Windu know you’re racing in that?” he asked, even though he sort of had an inkling as to why this was happening after Plo had brought it up. As much as they butted heads, Anakin thought he had a pretty good handle on Mace Windu as a person and Windu might be an asshole but he was a fucking funny one when he really put his mind to it. 

Māhoe nodded. “It was his idea.”

 _Got it in one,_ he thought, snorting despite himself. _Windu was such a dick, and Māhoe’s got no clue._

He figured he should take pity on him. After all, if he was as serious about Obi-Wan as he seemed, he would need to be prepared for Windu.

“Man, not to rain on your parade,” Anakin said, “but you do know why he said you could, right?”

Māhoe’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

“You’ll get across the finish line,” he told him. “I’m too good at what I do for it not to. Ain’t gonna be pretty when you do, but you will, and someone will tape it, and Windu will get a nice little chuckle out of watching the guy who relentlessly hits on his favorite kid embarrass himself in front of our entire community.”

There was a long pause, filled with the riotous chatter of everyone around them. Māhoe looked at Anakin. Anakin looked at Māhoe.

“Motherfucker,” he said.

“Yeah,” Anakin laughed. He looked regretfully towards Empire’s crew before jerking his thumb back in the direction he came from. “Obi-Wan’s up that way. C’mon, let’s go see if he’ll take pity on you and work some of his magic, see if you don’t crash and burn too spectacularly.”

He turned back to his car and crew, Māhoe trailing him slowly in the Civic. He didn’t really care who he was racing from Empire tonight — Ventress was the only one of Palpatine’s crew that ever gave him a challenge, he was more worried about Tiin and whatever his new ride was — but he’d wanted to see if he could get any info from them about the heists. 

Anakin didn’t think Palpatine would keep it in the family at the garage, if there was a chance there could be blowback against him. He’d always cast himself as the friendly, if vaguely disapproving, grandfather of the LA racing scene — especially when Anakin was a kid — and made it seem like he was more above board than all the rest of them combined. He was probably too smart to risk giving his own mechanics the job.

But Palpatine was also the only person outside of Windu, Obi-Wan, and Anakin who knew about the heist plans. He was behind it, and Anakin just needed to figure out how to expose his crew, tie it back to him if they were outsiders, and then how to not get caught in the crosshairs of his own plan.

“Right,” he muttered to himself. “Easy as that.”

Anakin directed Māhoe to a spot next to R2-D2, waving people out of the way so he could park the Civic. He glanced over towards the crowd by Republic, quickly spotting Fisto’s distinctive neon-green shot braids as he leaned down to talk to a pretty woman in a hijab, Adi with her back away from them and chatting with Tiin himself and Cin Drallig. He turned back to his crew.

Obi-Wan was leaning against R2, arms crossed over his chest, Plo and Vos on either side of him and a group of people chatting with them. Vos was holding court, keeping most of the attention on himself, though a couple people kept trying to touch Obi-Wan’s crossed arms.

He looked over his shoulder at Māhoe, who was climbing out of the Civic, a vaguely thunderous look on his face. To be fair, thought Anakin, that probably was just his resting face.

When the guys saw that Anakin was there, and that a Civic had parked next to them, Obi-Wan broke away from the group and headed towards them. One girl watched him go, frowning, and Anakin figured she was new.

“Mace truly let you take it out?” asked Obi-Wan, not even waiting for permission to pop the hood and get to business. “I thought this was collateral he inherited.”

“It has been pointed out to me,” said Māhoe, “that perhaps I am being played.”

Obi-Wan looked up briefly from the engine to flash him a blinding smile. He said, “Almost certainly, but let’s see what we can do to mitigate that, shall we?” and dropped back beneath the hood.

Māhoe moved to lean against the front bumper and stare down at Obi-Wan as he worked. Anakin watched this for a moment before deciding he could save this material to torment Obi-Wan with later and turned back to Vos and Plo. Most of the crowd around them had dispersed but a man and a woman were still chatting with Vos.

“Any word on who’s driving?” asked Plo.

“Nah,” said Anakin. “I saw Ventress, and one of the Opress brothers I think, but ran into this clown before I could ask which one of them was up tonight.”

Māhoe flashed him what was probably a very rude hand gesture in Maori culture but otherwise ignored him, continuing to watch Obi-Wan bang around beneath the hood of the Civic.

Vos, on the other hand, was successfully distracted from his two admirers. “Asaji’s here?”

“Dude,” said Anakin, “your thing with her is even weirder than Māhoe and Obi-Wan. I mean Obi-Wan’s a grandpa but he’s, like, a mega babe and also a very nice man or whatever. Ventress is, I don't know, man, but, like, do you think it hurt when she broke through the earth’s crust as she ascended from hell?”

Plo snorted. Vos just smiled.

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” he said.

“The heart’s gonna get a VD, I think,” Anakin said, “or possibly cursed.”

“I can’t believe I let Ahsoka and the boys around any of you,” said Plo.

“Yeah, that is wild, Plo,” said Vos. “You shouldn’t do that.”

“Hey,” said Anakin. “I bring Padmé and her gang of mean, feminist anarchists around. I’m a great role model.”

“You just told me I’m going to get a VD from a perfectly nice lady just because you feel threatened by her racing abilities.”

“I respect Ventress as a racer just fine, don’t bring that mess in here. What I _am_ saying,” he said, “is that she’s the devil.”

“If you’re all done,” said Adi Gallia.

Vos and Anakin both turned to see Adi at the front of R2, hands on her hips, smirking. Vos pointed at her. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough,” she said. “Anakin, Saesee is driving a Mazda RX-7 now. It’s his first race in it, so they’re not sure how it’s going to handle, but obviously Tiin’s a great driver.”

“NOS?” asked Plo.

“Of course,” she said.

“All right,” said Anakin. “The RX-7 is a pretty good ride, even before whatever other mods they made. And I know what Tiin’s like behind the wheel, and I can work with untested.”

“Think you’ve got it in the bag, kid?” asked Māhoe.

Anakin smirked. “I’m the best there is, man.”

Obi-Wan emerged from beneath the hood of the Civic, slamming it closed, and said, “Now, Anakin, don’t get cocky.”

He eyed him. “I know you’re good, Obi-Wan, but I don’t think you can pull a miracle out of your sweater vest for Māhoe in less than five minutes.”

“No,” he said, smiling apologetically at Māhoe. “No, unfortunately, I’d need a bit longer than that. I meant Ventress.”

“Ouch,” said Māhoe but he smiled back — more a smirk than anything, but Anakin wasn’t certain the man could manage anything else.

There was some commotion at the front of the area they’d parked along and Fisto popped back through the crowd to nod his head at them and wave his arm behind him.

“Time to roll, Skywalker,” he said. “You too, Māhoe.”

Anakin sent him a thumbs up and hopped into RD-D2, buckling himself in. From the corner of his eye, he would see Māhoe doing the same, and then Obi-Wan was ducking his head in the window and double checking Anakin’s harness and seat belt. When he was satisfied with how they were resting, he patted him on the shoulder and straightened up.

“Gonna go check on Māhoe too?” Anakin asked.

“You know you’re who I’m rooting for,” Obi-Wan said, serious, and Anakin turned the ignition on.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Get out of here, go check on your boyfriend.”

“I would,” he said, particularly arch, “if anyone present actually asked me on a date and therefore qualified for the title.”

Anakin’s eyes widened and looked back at Obi-Wan, desperately hoping that Māhoe had heard that but all he could see was Vos and Fisto in front of his car, their backs turned to them.

“You can’t say shit like that before I’m about to race,” said Anakin. “You know my short term memory is shot before and after!”

Obi-Wan smirked but Vos looked over his shoulder and winked at Anakin, shooting him a thumbs up. He’d heard, which meant both that it would make it back to Māhoe before the night was over and that he would also bring this particular piece of hot gossip up every single chance he got.

“Fine, fine,” he said. He revved his engine — a little for show, a little to get people moving out of his way. “See you at the finish line.”

“Of course,” said Obi-Wan. 

Anakin pulled out of his spot, glancing in the rearview to watch Obi-Wan head toward the Thunderbird and pop his helmet on. Fisto and Vos were heading towards Fisto’s car, having driven in together, and Plo and Adi had already hoped in their own cars to head to the finish line. Anakin watched Māhoe follow behind him, and the car from Empire further behind them both, and wondered absently who Dex had gotten on the radios along the street.

They lined their cars up at the starting line, Tiin and the driver from Empire — some guy Anakin didn’t recognize, he frowned and then decided not to worry about it — on the sides, Anakin next to Tiin and Māhoe next to the Empire guy. Tiin nodded at Anakin and he nodded back before focusing on the flag girl out in front of them, Dex next to her. The road stretched out before them, lined with hot rods and suped up rides.

Dex raised his arms and then they were off.

Tiin took the lead at first, but Anakin was close behind him, pressing firmly down against the gas and waiting patiently to overtake him. His speedometer climbed: eighty then ninety, then one hundred. He looked at the switch for his first NOS tank.

The guy from Empire was firmly in his rearview but Māhoe was creeping up.

Anakin looked at his speedometer again: one-ten, one-fifteen.

He passed Tiin, finger against the switch but still waiting.

Māhoe shot up from third, passing Tiin in a blur, and then he was right next to Anakin before shooting forward again, rubber burning and squealing.

“Too soon,” said Anakin and hit his NOS.

R2-D2 sprang forward, speedometer rising even faster than before: one-twenty-five, one-forty. Anakin thought about the second NOS switch but dismissed it immediately. It would just be showboating at that point, and as much as he wanted a victory lap, he could get it in later when he cracked the case.

He crossed the finish line and pumped the breaks. They’d been worn to a perfect groove over the years and he slid to a stop. People rushed his car, and he glanced again in his rearview, watching as Māhoe crossed the line second, the Civic spinning to a stop and white smoke pouring from the engine. Tiin crossed next and finally the guy from Empire Anakin didn’t know.

Vos slammed into the side of his car.

“Fuck, yeah, Skywalker!” he shouted through his open window.

Anakin grinned and unhooked himself.

“How much did I smoke them by?” he asked.

“I think Māhoe has the market cornered on smoking things,” laughed Fisto.

They all looked back at Māhoe and the Civic, which was still smoking gently. He stood next to it, hands on his hips and when Vos called, “You owe Windu another ten-second car, brother,” he shouted good-naturedly back, “Go fuck yourself, Vos.”

A crowd quickly formed around Anakin, people clapping him on the back and shouting. He shook hands, laughing and basking in the praise, feeling goddamn _alive,_ and made his way through the crowd to the other drivers.

“Nice driving,” said Saesee Tiin when Anakin got to his side. 

“You too, man,” he said.

“Thanks,” he said. He reached up to tuck back the little bits of hair that had come loose from his turban as he drove. Tiin gestured back to his car, saying, “Not bad for a first time out, considering I was up against you and a car you and Kenobi worked on. Too bad Māhoe hit it too early.”

Anakin snorted. “Yeah, too bad. Granny shifting, not double clutching when he should — ”

Tiin laughed too. “Yeah, he’s lucky he didn’t blow out the intake with that double shot of NOS.

“For real,” he said. “Hey — who’s the guy from Empire? I don’t recognize him.”

Tiin straightened up. Anakin was tall, but Tiin was a fucking giant of a man. He looked out over the crowd and then shrugged. “No idea. Don’t see any of that crew right now.”

“Sore losers,” commented Luminara Unduli. She leaned up against Tiin’s car and she nodded at Anakin. “Dex is looking for you to give you the pot.”

“I’ll find him in a minute,” he said. “Did you know who it was?”

Unduli shrugged too. “Name starts with an _s_ or maybe a _g_ , I think? I saw him at the last meet Dex set up. Other than that, no clue. New to LA, for sure.”

“Huh,” said Anakin.

“What’s been up with Windu?” asked Unduli. “It’s been boring without you guys.”

“You didn’t get the down-low from Fisto?” teased Anakin. She raised an eyebrow at him, arch, but a little color still appeared high on her cheeks. He waved it off, “Sorry, sorry, but yeah, nah, he’s had a bee in his bonnet about that robbery or whatever last month.”

“The heist out on the 15 by Barstow?” asked Tiin.

Anakin nodded. 

_Donnie Brasco, who?_ he thought.

“I wonder who did it,” said Unduli, thoughtful. Tiin glanced at her.

“You think someone in the scene did?”

“Cops were hanging around us,” commented Anakin. “I mean, Dooku’s got a hate-on for Windu and everything, but could be —”

“Five-oh!” someone shouted. 

“Oh, shit,” said Anakin. Tiin and Luminara were already jumping into the RX-7 and Anakin darted back through the thinning crowd of people to R2-D2. He caught a glimpse of Fisto’s lime green Toyota 86 peeling out and saw Obi-Wan nodding at him, popping his helmet back on. He slid into the driver’s seat and looked around quickly to make sure Plo and Adi had made it out — long gone, he figured, when he didn’t see the distinctive spoiler on Adi’s Camaro — when he saw Māhoe still standing by his Civic. There was no way he was getting that thing back in the road before the cops got there.

Anakin reached over and popped the passenger door. “Get in!”

Māhoe looked at him, then at the encroaching cop lights.

“Dude,” he said. “Get in the fucking car, man, I can lose them no problem. But we gotta go!”

He slid into the passenger seat and Anakin was already peeling down the street before he even had a chance to slam the door shut. He sped through a couple blocks, eyes flicking to the rearview every few seconds, lights still flashing there, and then took three turns in quick succession, two lefts and then a right. He drove three more blocks and then doubled back, one street over from the ones he’d been on before. Anakin spotted a parking garage and pulled in, driving quickly through it to the second entrance/exit and shooting out the other side. 

The sirens faded away into the night but Anakin kept taking random turns, backtracking here and there, and silence was absolute in the car. After twenty minutes of meandering aimlessly through the streets, going a careful five miles above the speed limit, he got them on the 605 N towards Bellflower.

“Away from LA?” commented Māhoe.

“Just for a little bit,” said Anakin. “We’ll hit the 91 and go east for a bit, then go back towards LA. Just in case.”

“Smart,” said Māhoe.

“Not just a pretty face,” he said. “Speaking of pretty faces —”

“I really left the door open for you on that one, didn’t I.”

“You sure did,” Anakin said. 

Māhoe sighed. “Gonna try to warn me off him again?”

“Would you listen if I did?” he asked.

“Almost definitely not,” he said.

“Then I will simply continue to make fun of you for wanting to be all up in his sweater vests.”

Snorting, Māhoe looked out the window as the highway lights flew past. He muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “I’d like to take those sweater vests off with my teeth,” and Anakin wasn’t going to get within ten city fucking blocks of that.

He fiddled with the radio.

“What were you looking for, anyway,” asked Māhoe after a moment, “when you found his juvie records?”

“Juvie records, full stop,” said Anakin. “I knew they existed — Vos is probably the second foremost giver of Obi-Wan shit, and brought it up a bunch — but they would never talk about _why._ I figured he boosted cars or something, that’s the kind of shit people like us get up to as teenagers, you know?”

“But it was a fight club,” he said. 

“They were sealed.” Anakin shrugged. “So, like, I really don’t know. But Vos, and Fisto, always joke about Obi-Wan smacking people around and, well. Uh.”

Māhoe turned back to look at him. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Hey, you know what he said tonight?”

“What?”

Anakin grinned. “He said, and he clearly thought I would forget about this because he dropped it before the race but it’s totally burned into my memory now, so he said, and I quote, if anyone present bothered to ask him on a date they would qualify as his boyfriend.”

“What prompted that?” asked Māhoe. He could practically hear the guy trying to keep his cool with both hands.

“I made a joke about you being his boyfriend,” he said. “And he got all prissy and said that.”

“Huh.” He went back to the window, a thoughtful look on his face. 

Anakin was the greatest little brother on the planet. He was going to make sure none of them served jail time, and he was going to get Obi-Wan a hot boyfriend from New Zealand or wherever. And he would do it with minimal shit talking! Well, going forward, he thought, but stil!

“He likes tea,” Anakin offered after a moment. “Like, a lot. And he likes going to scrap yards and shit and haggling with people for parts. Also, he likes to yell at people on the internet about vintage cars.”

“One of my brothers likes doing that,” Māhoe said, absently. He blinked. “Wait, are you trying to tell me to take him to a scrap yard for a date?”

He shrugged. “Or a tea shop.”

“Those are two wildly different things,” he said. “Don’t you have an extremely beautiful and fancy lawyer girlfriend?”

“Padmé’s actually super feral, she just hides it well,” Anakin said. “She’s going to work for the Innocence Project and yell at cops when she graduates, it’s gonna be awesome. Why? I take her out for tea all the time.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well. Do you think I should take him to a scrap yard? And, what? Bring a thermos of tea to give him? Look for parts with him and then casually slip in that this has been a date and that I’d very much like to go back to his, or mine, I’m not picky, and have lots of sex with him?”

“Yuck,” said Anakin, “but, yeah sure, take him to a scrap yard, romance him, be gross.”

“Well, I’ll keep that under advisement. Any other suggestions?”

Anakin thought for a moment.

“You could get him parts for the ‘Bird,” he said.

Māhoe eyed him again. “Does he need parts for the ‘Bird?”

“Uh, yeah, nah,” said Anakin, snorting. “That shit’s a masterpiece. But you’d be, like, showing you were interested in his hobbies or whatever?”

“I _am_ interested in his hobbies,” said Māhoe. “I knew about the tea thing, but I didn’t know about the scrap yard thing. Do you think he’d like it if I took him?”

“Probably,” he said. “None of us go with him anymore because we’re, quote, a bunch of distracting, annoying assholes, but I bet he’d like some company. You could take him for tea afterwards!”

“You’re really hitting this tea thing hard,” Māhoe commented.

“We have a whole cabinet of the stuff,” said Anakin. “It’s like his whole personality at this point.”

“Then I’ll take him out for tea,” he said.

The exit for the 91 East was coming up, so Anakin switched lanes and started to slow down a bit. He reviewed his mental map of SoCal. There was an interchange with the 5 at Almond maybe ten minutes away. They could hop on there and head north; they’d hit the 10 near East LA and then it’d be a straight shot back to Venice. Māhoe could crash with them and they could drive him to the shop in the morning, then go pick up the Civic if the cops hadn’t towed it away yet.

“You like him a lot, huh?” Anakin asked after he made the exit onto the 91. “Like, really? All his weird, neurotic, stuck-up grandpa shit and everything.”

“Yeah,” Māhoe said. The corner of his mouth ticked up; for him, it was practically a dopey smile. “I really do. Why?”

“Lots of people,” said Anakin, “like the package but not the contents. And like I know I make fun of him a lot, but he’s still my brother, okay? And I don’t got a lot of family. Neither does he. We’re it. Him and me, and Depa, and also Windu but don’t tell him I said that.”

“I know,” said Māhoe. “You know, what it’s like with family. I got a big one but — well, let’s just say I didn’t want to go into the family business. Mine and me, we don’t really see eye to eye after that, so it’s just me and my kid. So I get it.”

“I didn’t know you had a kid,” he said after a moment.

Māhoe nodded. “Yeah. Boba. He’s just five. Mom’s out of the picture, which is fine by us.”

“Who's watching him?”

“I got an auntie that came Stateside back in the nineties,” he said. “She’s just about the only person in my family still likes me — and I think it’s probably mainly for the kid, so she watches him if I gotta work nights.”

“Obi-Wan know?” asked Anakin.

“Yeah,” he said. “I brought him to the shop once, you were out with your girl, I think.”

Anakin chewed on the side of his thumb. “So, you know how my mom died, right?”

Māhoe startled briefly at the change in topic but recovered. He nodded and asked, “Cancer?”

“Yeah,” said Anakin. “Ovarian. She’d had it for a while before it got really bad. Obi-Wan was really the only person who, like, got it because the guy who raised him died super young too, but like suddenly. Not like Mom. Anyway, he used to take her to appointments, because I was too young and she couldn’t anymore. She told me once that it reminded her of how we met Obi-Wan, like really met him, back when I was a little kid, and it always made her smile. She hadn’t liked that we met him that way, she always said, but she was glad all the same.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because he saved us,” he told Māhoe. “See, Mom used to work for this guy Watto, who’s not around anymore, and he had these bad debts, and one night he put Mom’s contract up as part of a pot in a race, clear himself off the books. Mom was really good, really fucking good, so people went nuts for it.”

“Windu won,” Māhoe said, “right? I think I’ve heard about that race.”

“Yeah,” he said again. “It makes the rounds as a story, like a legend or whatever, every once in a while. Because one of the other racers tried to get in Windu’s face, stepped up to Mom, and Obi-Wan laid the guy the fuck out.”

“Obi-Wan?”

“I’m talking, he _ruined_ that guy. I’m not sure what happened to the guy after, but it was bad. People were worried Obi-Wan would go to prison, I think, so everyone kept quiet about it. The guy totally deserved it, what Obi-Wan did. He saved my mom. He ended up in the clinic after, too, and that’s where we met him. He had a really severe concussion and a bunch of broken ribs, barely looked like himself. He was twenty-one, I think, twenty-two.” Anakin drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Anyway. That’s why I’m pretty sure about the fight club thing. Maybe it wasn’t, like, a _fight club,_ but Obi-Wan definitely used to beat the shit out of people. And, like, that’s not all of him, okay? It’s just one part. But if you’re serious about it, about him, then I figure you should know.”

Māhoe stared at him for a moment. Anakin could feel his eyes moving over his face as he kept his eyes on the road. Eventually, he saw Māhoe nod sort of thoughtfully from the corner of his eye and return to looking out the window.

They drove the rest of the way back to Venice in relative silence, except for when Anakin suddenly remembered he’d forgotten something pretty important at the battle.

“Shit,” he said.

“What?” asked Māhoe.

“I never got the prize money from Dex.”

Obi-Wan wasn’t in the house when Anakin and Māhoe finally made it back to Venice, but there were several cups of unfinished tea scattered throughout the rooms of the house, which meant that he had been there and he’d been stressed. Anakin realized abruptly that his phone was still off from before the race and that maybe Obi-Wan’s fighting career wasn’t as over as he thought, because he was almost definitely about to get his ass handed to him.

“Hey, I’m back!” he called, walking back towards the living room and to kitchen. Maybe he was out back. Then, louder, “Obi-Wan?”

Maybe two minutes later, the screen door to the porch opened and then shut, and Obi-Wan appeared in the archway of the kitchen. He had on a pair of threadbare sweatpants, rolled to just below his knees, and a Stern School of Business t-shirt that he’d clearly stolen from Depa at some point. His glasses had been pushed back into his hair and he had the dumb novelty mug Anakin bought him, the one that doubled as a bong and read _high tea,_ gripped tightly in his hand. There was sand on his legs.

Obi-Wan stared at him. “Where have you been?”

“Outrunning the cops?” he offered. A muscle in Obi-Wan’s cheek jumped.

“Hey,” said Māhoe from behind Anakin’s shoulder. “It’s my fault. I couldn’t get the Civic to start, and he hung back to get me. Cops spotted us so we had to take the long way back.”

“I see,” said Obi-Wan in a tone of voice that suggested he did not, in fact, see. “And where were your cell phones in all of this?”

Māhoe winced at the same time Anakin did.

“I was very worried, Anakin,” he continued. “We all met back at the garage and when no one could account for you — for either of you — I thought you’d been picked up. Mace has bail money prepared.”

“Oh, Jesus,” muttered Anakin. “I’ll text him, Obi-Wan. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

“Yes, well,” he said, “you should be.”

Then, he turned to look at Māhoe, who had apparently recovered from being the center of Obi-Wan’s disappointment very quickly and was now staring at Obi-Wan’s hairy, sandy shins.

Anakin stepped on the top of his foot.

“I told Māhoe he could crash with us tonight,” he said, “and that we’d take him to the shop in the morning and figure out if we can get the Civic back.”

“We already have,” said Obi-Wan. 

“You have?” asked Anakin.

The tension in Obi-Wan’s jaw finally disappeared and he rolled his eyes, turning his back to them and walking to the kitchen, expecting that they would follow. They did.

“You _have_ been out of the loop for almost three hours,” Obi-Wan was saying. “We are capable of taking care of any number of things in that amount of time. Including putting together, say, a large sum of cash for —”

“I get it, I get it,” he said, pulling his cell out of his pocket and turning it on. A truly alarming number of text messages appeared on his phone — most of them, predictably, from Obi-Wan and Windu but a few from Plo and one from Padmé that almost definitely had nothing to do with this evening, unless his luck had really taken a nosedive. “Look, I’m texting Windu right now!”

“Thank you,” he said. He turned to look at Māhoe. “You are, of course, welcome to the sofa, should you choose it as an option.”

Busy with the mea culpa he was composing to Windu — _i’m fine, back with obi-wan + bojangles (couldn’t let him get nabbed) am v v sorry i worried your shiny bald head_ — he said, distracted, “Are you forgetting you don’t have a guest room anymore? I live there now.”

There was a long silence. Anakin glanced up to see the tail end of what he assumed had been a very long, very thorough once over of Māhoe from Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan said, “I wasn’t speaking of _your_ bed, Anakin.”

“What,” he said.

“Well,” said Māhoe. He was — _Christ_ — he was blushing faintly.

“Yes,” said Obi-Wan. “As I said, the offer of the sofa stands, as well. Though if memory serves, it’s not quite as comfortable, or as warm, as other options.”

“I do like being comfortable,” said Māhoe, “and warm.”

Anakin’s phone buzzed. Windu, of course, telling him that he’ll worry his shiny bald head about whatever he pleases, thank you very much, and that they’d talk about responsible bail outs from races gone bad in the morning, which was a conversation he was looking forward to about as much as the conclusion of whatever the fuck was happening in front of him in the kitchen right now.

Māhoe shifted his weight to the side, and leaned against the doorframe. His forearms flexed beneath the rolled up cuffs of his shirtsleeves. The ink on his right forearm rippled.

Obi-Wan took a sip of his tea. His eyes flicked down Māhoe’s body again in a manner that Anakin could only describe — and, _God,_ he hated himself and everyone in the kitchen — as heated.

“Ugh, gross,” Anakin said. “Could you at least wait until I’m locked firmly behind my bedroom door to mount him on the kitchen table?”

“Anakin,” he said severely. “Don’t be crude. Besides, the table’s from IKEA — there’s no way it would be able to withstand what I suspect would be quite athletic — ”

“Jesus Christ, no!” he shouted, ramming his fingers in his ears as he scrambled from the table. “God, why are you like this?”

He stumbled towards the hall as Māhoe said, “Athletic, huh?”

Anakin sprinted the rest of the way to his room, slamming the door behind him and wailing. It was only a little bit for dramatic affect.

When he woke up the next morning much early than was his custom, it was to a truly amazing smell. He pulled the blankets off his face and sniffed, then sat up. It was deeply unusual, in the Kenobi-Skywalker household, to wake up to the scent of well cooked food. Oh, Obi-Wan could hold his own in the kitchen but he’d only ever mastered traditional Indian or West African foods, thanks to Depa and Windu’s influences, and usually needed direct supervision. When left alone, he generally tried to exist on tea and beans on toast, because he was a parody of a British person. Meanwhile, Anakin once lit a Cup Noodles on fire in the microwave, so the less said about his cooking abilities, the better. The only reason they never starved to death living together was because Windu still insisted on Sunday night family dinners — chilly silence optional, regular silence prefered — and gave them the leftovers.

Also, Plo, who perhaps managed to radiate the strongest dad energy in a shop full of people with incredibly strong dad energy, including Adi Gallia, usually took pity on them and had breakfast waiting when they got in most mornings.

Anakin left the bed, threw on some sweatpants, and wandered down the hall. He couldn’t hear anything from the general direction of Obi-Wan’s bedroom — he hadn’t all night, which filled him with cautious optimism — but from the kitchen, there was sizzling and vague, off-key humming.

Obi-Wan, because he was _perfect_ and had probably been grown in a goddamn lab, had a truly beautiful singing voice, so that was another point in favor of the mystery chef being Māhoe.

He peeked around the frame when he got closer, just in case something horrific was happening in there.

It was just Māhoe, in the end, standing in front of the stove, barefoot in his jeans and an a-frame so old it was translucent where it pulled over his shoulders. Anakin had seen a lot of Māhoe’s ink, of course — the man was proud of his culture and often wore short sleeves when he wasn’t in coveralls — but he hadn’t realized the extent of them. The half sleeve on his left bicep curled back over his shoulder, covering the whole of the bone and muscle there. He had something down his spine, too, but Anakin couldn’t quite make it out.

The humming stopped. Māhoe glanced over his shoulder and gestured with the wooden spoon in his hand. “I’m just finishing up a scramble but there’s toast and some hashed sweet potato under that plate.”

Anakin grabbed a plate from the cupboard. “We had sweet potatoes?”

“No,” he said. “You had nothing but white bread and Skippy All Natural. I took a Lyft to Trader Joe’s.”

“Oh,” said Anakin. “Thanks.”

Māhoe waved his spoon and went back to the eggs, humming again.

Anakin watched him for another second and then sat at the table. He put some toast on his plate and then the sweet potatoes. He ate a forkful and then went back to put more on his plate. _Holy shit,_ he thought. _These are dope as hell._

“Dude, where’d you learn to cook?” he asked.

“Don’t talk with your mouth open,” admonished Obi-Wan. He walked past Anakin, poking him hard in the head, and up to Māhoe, who turned to look at him, mouth quirking up. Obi-Wan stood next to him, not quite touching but very, very close, and said, “Oh, those eggs look wonderful.”

“Go sit,” said Māhoe. “I’ll bring the pan over where they’re finished.”

“Of course,” said Obi-Wan. He’d already gotten dressed for the day too, jeans and button down and stuffy sweater vest, face looking pinked and freshly scrubbed beneath his beard and hair damp, curling against his forehead. He turned, slow, and Anakin watched as his fingers grazed along Māhoe’s hip, where there was a small sliver of exposed skin between the edge of his shirt and his jeans. Māhoe smiled, with a truly upsetting amount of teeth.

“Oh my God,” said Anakin, very quietly, to his sweet potatoes.

“What was that?”

“Oh my God,” he said a little louder and with what was probably very forced enthusiasm, “these sweet potatoes are dope as hell.”

Obi-Wan’s eyebrow was still raised but he looked slightly more mollified. Māhoe chuckled.

“Thanks,” he said, stirring the pan in front of him one more time before turning the burner off and bringing it to them at the table. He sat down with them, across from Obi-Wan, and dished out some truly fluffy and delicious looking eggs to each of them. He continued, “My mum was a short order cook back home before she had us kids. She taught me. I think mainly to keep me out of trouble but it’s a good life skill.”

Anakin leaned back in his chair, tipping it back onto both legs, said, “I once set a metal pot full of water on fire,” and snuck a look beneath the table. Obi-Wan had one of his bare feet sitting on top of Māhoe’s. Anakin was going to have to go walk into the ocean if they were planning on keeping that shit up. He loved love and public displays of affection as much as any one but, ugh, gross, that was his brother!

“How did you manage that?” Māhoe was asking.

“No one knows,” Obi-Wan said, shaking his head and buttering his toast, “but it is a not uncommon kitchen related habit of his.”

“I’m not allowed to help at family dinner,” Anakin said with a broad grin. “You, though —”

What he had forgotten, apparently, was that even if Obi-Wan had one foot on top of Māhoe’s, he still had one free to kick Anakin in the shin. He winced and tried to cover it by stuffing his mouth full of eggs.

Māhoe, once again, looked deeply amused. It was impressive, the level of emotion he could convey while still giving the appearance of being completely impassive. “Well,” he said, “I would be honored if Windu ever invited me to a family dinner. Not that it seems like it’d be likely any time soon, what with last night.”

“Hey, speaking of last night,” said Anakin. “I didn’t get my money from Dex before the cops raided us.”

“I think he’s planning on bringing it round the shop,” said Obi-Wan.

They talked a little bit more about the battle — even Obi-Wan had no idea who the driver from Empire had been — and Tiin’s new ride. Anakin watched Māhoe and Obi-Wan trade the occasional look, too, as they ate, like a particularly strange, sexually fraught tennis match. He had no desire to investigate what was happening beneath the table — it had to be continuing, he just knew it — but he was trying to file as much information away as possible for later. Padmé had texted him about grabbing dinner together later, and she and her girl gang were even more invested in Obi-Wan’s lovelife than Anakin was.

Māhoe ended up finishing before all of them, wiping his mouth on a paper towel and bringing his dish and the pan of eggs over to the sink.

“I’ve to go pick Boba up from his auntie’s,” he said. “He’s got pre-k in the afternoon Tuesday’s and Thursday’s and I like to try to spend the morning with him if I can.”

“Of course,” said Obi-Wan. “And don’t even think of doing the washing up right now — you made breakfast for Anakin and I, it’s the least we can do.”

“If you’re sure,” Māhoe said.

“I am.” Obi-Wan stood, his own plate in hand, and also dropped it in the sink. He went back to his chair, which had the shirt Māhoe had been wearing the night before hanging off the back. He picked it up and handed it to him. He said, “Are you sure I can’t take you home? I have an extra helmet.”

“Yeah, nah,” said Māhoe, shrugging the shirt on but not buttoning it. “Thanks for the offer but I’d just make you late. Boba will be sad to miss you though.”

“Please tell him I say hello, then,” Obi-Wan said. “Here, I’ll walk you to the door.”

“See ya, Skywalker. Thanks again for last night.”

“Of course,” said Anakin.

They left the kitchen.

Immediately, Anakin leaned back in his chair again. Angling himself, he was able to see just a little of the front hall. Māhoe was standing by the open door, Obi-Wan just beside him. He said something soft that Anakin couldn’t hear but that made Obi-Wan bite his lip and then Māhoe leaned down and kissed Obi-Wan at the corner of his mouth. He left.

The front door closed with a click behind him. Anakin dropped the chair back to four legs and proceeded to knock back the eggs as fast as he could. After a second, Obi-Wan returned to the kitchen and sat down in his spot. Anakin kept shoveling food into his mouth, grinning like a lunatic.

“Don’t,” he said.

Around a mouthful of eggs, Anakin said indignantly, “I wasn’t saying shit!”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You were thinking very loudly.”

“I was thinking about how great these eggs are!”

“You most certainly were not,” said Obi-Wan.

“Yes I was!” he said. “I was thinking about how great these eggs are, and how excited I’ll be when Māhoe moves in and becomes my new dad and makes these eggs everyday! Do you think his kid will like me? I’ve always wanted to be a big brother.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“What?” said Anakin. “I’m being serious.”

“Finish your eggs,” said Obi-Wan, long-suffering. “We don’t want to be late.”

Glaring — Anakin would make a freakin’ awesome big brother — he cleared off his plate and helped Obi-Wan load everything into the dishwater. He hopped in the bathroom for a quick shower and when he emerged, Obi-Wan was still in the kitchen, this time drinking a cup of tea leaned up against the counter, phone in one hand. When he saw that Anakin was there, he tucked his phone in the front pocket of his dark jeans and drained his tea.

“Shall we?” he said. 

Anakin held up the keys to R2-D2, twirling them round his finger.

Unless Anakin had slept through his alarm and Obi-Wan had given up on trying to wake him up and rode his Thunderbird in, he usually drove them to the shop together. While Obi-Wan knew more about cars than anyone Anakin had ever met, he didn’t particularly enjoy driving one. It was hilariously incongruous: the brilliant mechanic who loved cars but refused to get behind the wheel unless he had to. Anakin never asked why, just chalked it up to another weird facet to his big foster brother’s personality, and figured he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth or whatever. It meant that he was always the one driving.

Traffic wasn’t bad that morning, and luckily they had a good commute from Obi-Wan’s house to the autobody shop, up further north, towards Santa Monica. Anakin never envied the drive Fisto and Vos made from their place in the Culver City.

When they rolled in, Anakin put up with good natured ribbing from the guys who were there — Adi had the day off — about his three hour radio silence, and endured the baleful gaze of Mace Windu from his office. Windu had apparently decided to spare him a lecture — maybe he figured Obi-Wan had already gotten in the mother of them all — and was content to keep an eye on him, occasionally looking up from his paperwork to glare whenever Anakin emerged from beneath a car.

Around one p.m., they found themselves crowding into the café to get some lunch, where Plo’s youngest, Ahsoka, had replaced him behind the counter. She was fifteen, bubbly, possessed of a hilariously mean sense of humor, and had every single one of them at the shop wrapped around her finger — none more so than her own father. She was wiping down the counter and, when she saw them come in, she flung the dish towel over her shoulder and leaned forward, like an old timey bartender in a saloon.

“What can I get ya, fellas?” she said, smirking.

“Shouldn't you be in school or something?” asked Anakin.

She shook her head, the two thick braids on either side of her head whipping around her face like they had minds of their own. “Nope!” she said. “Parent-teacher conferences this week! Dad said I could help out here if I do homework in between orders. He’s doing prep in the back.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, in that case I’ll have the tuna melt.”

“Gross but okay,” she said. “Anyone else?”

“Fish tacos,” said Fisto and Vos together. Fisto added, “And fries please!”

“Sopes, if you would, my dear,” said Obi-Wan.

“Coming up!” she said and ducked into the back kitchen to give Plo the orders.

Anakin hopped behind the counter and popped the till, accepting bills from the others and putting them in. A café attached to an autobody shop wasn’t exactly expected to turn a profit but — all jokes about the tuna melt aside, which Anakin thought was really good, thank you very much, Ahsoka — Plo definitely had a gift with both engines and food. When he got hired to work as a mechanic, he’d taken one look at the little grill set up Windu dished out grilled cheese and tuna melts from and turned into a place people actually liked to eat. Before his wife finished her teaching degree and got a job at the local high school, Plo and Shaak had put together a menu that called back to Shaak’s childhood in La Paz and their shared love of street food, gaining themselves a small but devoted afternoon lunch crowd from the Venice locals who didn’t mind that they often ate elbow to elbow with a bunch of grease monkeys.

They spilled themselves into a corner booth after they paid, Anakin and Vos on the inside, with Obi-Wan next to Anakin and Fisto next to Vos. They talked shop for a bit — some rich white bro had brought his car in that morning, wanting to race it, and while they all hated him on principle, they did like easy money — while they waited for their lunch.

Ahsoka swung by and dropped off a round of water and glass bottle Cokes before returning to the counter to take an order from the yuppie, tourist couple that had just wandered in. They probably thought it was a concept restaurant.

“What homework do you have?” called Obi-Wan, after she finished up. Ahsoka held up a thick textbook that appeared to have been heavily edited by her own pen.

“History as rewritten by the colonizers,” she said.

They all laughed and Obi-Wan said, “Well, as you know, my people were the foremost at that, so if you would like any help, do let me know.”

Ahsoka shot him a thumbs up and went back to marking up that book.

“I can’t wait until that kid leads a revolution,” Vos said. 

Plo popped out from the back then and handed out everyone’s plates before disappearing into the kitchen once more.

The bell above the café door dinged again and Māhoe walked over to their table.

“Hey,” he said. “Room for one more?”

“Here,” said Anakin, crawling over Obi-Wan who sighed theatrically but allowed it. “You can sit next to Obi-Wan, I’ll grab a chair. My legs are too damn long for this booth anyway.”

“Thanks,” he said, sliding in, as Anakin went to collect a chair from the counter.

“Can I get you anything, Mister Māhoe?” Ahsoka called.

“No, thanks, Ahsoka,” he said warmly. “Me and Boba had lunch before I dropped him at school.”

“Fries?” asked Fisto, offering up his plate.

Māhoe waved him off.

“Where’d you end up last night?” Vos asked. “I hauled the Civic back, so I know you didn’t leave in it — even if you’d been able to get it started.”

“Anakin took pity on me,” he said.

“Yep,” said Anakin, pasting what he hoped was an innocent smile on his face. He could feel Obi-Wan’s eyes on his face and he was glad he had moved out of kicking range. “Brought him home with me, and he spent the night.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” said Vos, eyes flickering back and forth between Māhoe and Obi-Wan as they sat next to each other. Māhoe had stretched a casual arm over the back of the booth, hand hanging down just shy of Obi-Wan’s shoulder. Vos’s face lit up with a terrible sort of glee and Anakin, for one, was greatly looking forward to this particular roast.

“Dude, keep it PG,” said Fisto with a significant jerk of his head towards the counter, where Ahsoka was looking up from her homework, watching them.

“It’s okay! Don’t mind me,” she said brightly. “Mom says that I should ignore all of you whenever possible because half of you were raised by wolves and don’t know any better. Also, she says that Quinlan needs Jesus.”

“Well,” said Obi-Wan after a moment, “I can’t say that Mrs Ti’s assessment isn’t wrong.”

Vos, who had apparently decided to lend more weight to the beautiful Mrs Shaak Ti’s claims that he needed the Lord, was aggressively wiggling his eyebrows at Māhoe until he cracked.

Which, to Māhoe’s credit, took a solid several minutes before he said, dryly, “I slept on the couch.”

Anakin shoved the last half of his tuna melt in his mouth to keep himself from commenting. He sincerely fucking doubted that.

It appeased Vos for the moment, though. He returned to his tacos, occasionally giving Māhoe a suspicious look now and again, but otherwise dropping the subject, and the table descended into silence again as they finished their meals.

“Heard there was a bit of a ruckus down at Empire this morning,” said Māhoe after a moment.

“Really?” asked Anakin.

“Mhmm.” He scratched one of his eyebrows idly. “Suspect whoever that driver was wasn’t too happy with his loss.”

“Yeah, who was that guy?” asked Fisto. “Never seen him before.”

“I don’t think he’s a mechanic,” said Vos. “I feel like we would have heard about them taking on a new guy.”

“Oh, you know what we could do?” said Fisto, and Anakin perked up. Was there another meet tomorrow night that he’d be able to do some quality sleuthing at? He’d barely gotten anything last night — though he thought maybe he should text Tiin, too, see if the crew at Republic had heard anything else, he could maybe start with asking about his car and then figure out how to work it into the conversation…

Fisto was saying, “There’s this thing tomorrow night down by the Santa Fe Reservoir, probably will have a bunch of guys from the scene there. We should go, maybe some of the Empire guys will be there and we can get the hot gossip.”

“Well, you know I love hot gossip,” Vos told him.

Obi-Wan looked across the table at Fisto skeptically. “And how did you hear about this?”

“Would you believe me if I said a Facebook group?”

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes.

“Dude,” said Anakin. “One of these days you’re gonna do that and your eyes are gonna get stuck like that.”

“If it hasn’t happened yet with you lot,” he said, “I doubt it ever will, but thank you so much for your concern, Anakin, dear. And, Kit, you didn’t answer my question.”

“I thought maybe you’d figured out.” He popped a french fry in his mouth, grinning as he chewed. “We used to hang at a lot of warehouses over that way when we were kids, remember? Gettin’ up to no good.”

“Oh, damn,” said Vos. “ _Those_ warehouses?”

Fisto’s grin got impossibly bigger. Māhoe’s gaze flicked between them, but Anakin only had eyes for Obi-Wan, who was biting his lip.

“I don’t know if that’s particularly wise,” he said slowly.

“Why not?” asked Vos.

“We’ve been trying not to call undue attention to ourselves,” cautioned Obi-Wan.

“Oh, come on, Kenobi, live a little,” he said. “It’s not like we actually have anything to hide.”

“Could be fun,” said Māhoe.

“Plus,” added Fisto, “Dooku’s lackeys haven’t been around in like a week. Even if we got up to some shit — which we won’t! — they’re not around to try to mess with us.”

Obi-Wan stared at them. Anakin was still watching him closely, waiting, and then he sighed, eyes closing. “Fine. Just — let’s not tell Mace, please?”

“Stays at the table,” said Vos. “Also, Kit, why’d you gotta bring up that asshole?”

“It was pertinent to the conversation,” said Fisto, in a very credible impression of Obi-Wan.

Vos didn’t laugh though, clearly still stuck on the topic of Dooku who they all hated as a matter of loyalty and also simply by virtue of Dooku truly being an ass. Vos was frowning, saying, “Man, I hate that fucking guy. What’s his deal anyway? He’s hated this shop Anakin was an actual infant and not just the baby boy he is now—”

“Fuck you!”

“—anyway, OB, you got the down low on that?”

Obi-Wan was staring out the front door of the café with a strange, unreadable expression on his face. He blinked and looked at Vos. He said, “No, all the business with Dooku was before my time.”

“Mace never said anything to you?” Vos pressed. “Or the old man? Everyone knows you’re his favorite.”

“No,” said Obi-Wan. “They never speak of it. But I always got the impression that whatever happened broke Yoda's heart, and Mace, of course, isn’t the type to forgive and forget.”

“Yeah, more like remember and revenge,” said Fisto, and they all laughed.

“Well, either way,” Vos said after a moment. “Dooku’s got it out for our shop in particular.”

“Because of something that happened back in the nineties?” asked Māhoe, skeptically.

“Yep,” said Anakin. This much even Anakin was aware of. “Even before those robberies, he’d send someone around here like once every couple months. They’d sit in some unmarked Crown Vic across the street for a day or two, send a guy in for a sandwich at lunch, we’d have a little fun with it, of course, and then they’d go away. Sometimes they’d do it in a black and white, scare customers away. You haven’t seen it yet, Māhoe, it sucks.”

“Won’t let a brother live,” Fisto commented, shaking his head. 

Vos fist bumped him and said, “Just like any cop, man. Fuck Dooku, and fuck the police. Cops—” here he stabbed his finger in the air emphatically “—are just serial killers with badges when you get down to it. Maybe not all individual cops, but the entire institution is ultimately fucking culpable. How many unarmed Black and brown boys do they kill a year, just for the crime of their skin?”

Obi-Wan leaned closer to Māhoe. “Quinlan’s wrote his Masters thesis in Social Work on community policing.”

“I’m thinking about running for city council next year,” he said, stretching back in his seat. “Anyway. Sorry I’m bringing the mood down. But what Dooku does to us here is just another example of the overreach of a corrupt, broken system, and their institutionalized racism. We street race? So goddamn what. But to him that means we’re gonna be further entangled in criminal enterprise, and it’s just another excuse for him to harass Windu, and us.”

“Makes you wish the old man was still around,” said Fisto. “I always loved it when he’d come round when they were here, play up the old feeble man thing, trip ‘em with his cane.”

Anakin snorted. “Remember when he made that one guy drop his tacos all over his lap?”

They all laughed. It had devolved into basically a _Three Stooges_ act, with the guy tripping all over himself and the tacos on the ground, stools crashing to their sides and cutlery flying, and they’d never seen that particular guy ever again.

“Oh, so here are all my mechanics,” said Windu. 

As one, they turned back to the entrance to the shop, where Windu was leaning in the doorway. He raised an eyebrow at them — if it wasn’t extremely obvious they didn’t, you’d think Mace Windu and Obi-Wan Kenobi shared a hefty chunk of DNA based on the eyebrow alone — and Anakin started reaching for everyone’s plates.

“That’s what I thought,” Windu said, watching him start bussing the table. “Back to work, gentleman, those cars won't fix themselves.”

“You got it, Boss,” said Vos, grabbing the water glasses.

They quickly and efficiently cleaned everything else off and brought it back to the kitchen for Plo to put everything through the industrial washer later, before returning to the shop. Māhoe split briefly to put on a set of coveralls and rejoined them to divy up the afternoon labor. After a quick discussion, they went to their respective projects and got to work.

Padmé coming to the shop — especially now — was a kind of unique anxiety for Anakin. It wasn’t like they got up to obviously illegal things in the shop — Windu would probably beat the shit out of them if they even thought about it — but a lot of what they did, worked on, and talked about tended to be about the street racing scene. The guys seemed to understand that Padmé didn’t know about that part of Anakin’s life, with varying feelings about that. (Obi-Wan and Plo both hated that he hid it, Adi thought he was an idiot, and Vos and Fisto would both just shrug and tell him it was his own life.)

But it didn’t mean that Padmé wasn’t extremely well liked at the shop. Sometimes, Anakin suspected they liked her better than him, which was fine. Anakin liked Padmé better than him too.

Still, it never failed to make him nervous when she came round, usually picking Anakin up for a date, though sometimes she brought in her Chevette for Anakin to work on. It was worse lately, with everything going on, but he was still excited to see her. As the clock inched closer to six, when Padmé was supposed to stop by, Anakin got antsier and antsier.

“Go wash up,” said Obi-Wan, around quarter to six. “You’re practically vibrating, it hurts to look at you. I’ll clean up your tools.”

“Thanks, Obi-Wan,” he said, starting to strip out of his coveralls even as he stood there. “We’re going to some super bougie place, too, I gotta, like, fully hose down.”

“Should I expect you at home tonight?” he asked, picking up Anakin’s tools and bringing them over to his own to clean up.

Anakin shrugged. “Depends. It’s midterms, so I don’t know how much work she’s got.”

“Well, I won’t wait up,” Obi-Wan said.

“What about you?” he asked, leering. “Got any guests coming over?”

Obi-Wan stared at him. He had his glasses on still and there was a little smear of oil on the left lens. He said, flat and exhausted sounding, “Anakin, please.” 

“That’s neither a yes nor a no,” he said brightly.

“No, Anakin,” he sighed, closing his eyes and shaking his head like Anakin pained him, deeply, on a spiritual level. Anakin grinned; he probably did. “I am not expecting guests tonight, thank you.”

“Because if you were,” he said, “I would make myself scarce. I just ask that you keep it to your bedroom, I sit on that couch too, you know?”

“If I beat you to death with this wrench,” Obi-Wan said, “not a court in the world would convict me.”

“I’ll represent you,” said Padmé from the doorway.

Anakin spun around, frowning. What was everyone’s deal today with lurking in doorways and startling him? He said, betrayed, “Padmé! How could you?”

“Sorry, honey,” she said. “You know I’m going into criminal defense, it’s just how it would happen, realistically.”

“Hello, Padmé,” said Obi-Wan, warmly. “Thank you for your offer of counsel. Hopefully, it will never be necessary, but I appreciate it all the same. Now, Anakin, go finish getting cleaned up, and have a lovely dinner.”

Anakin flipped him off, to which Obi-Wan just laughed, and went over to kiss Padmé on the cheek quickly before ducking into their little locker room. He finished stripping out of his coveralls, scrubbed his hands and arms up to his elbows and washed his face in the sink in the corner. He went to the small locker he shared with Obi-Wan, put on some of the emergency deodorant he kept there and a little bit of the cologne Obi-Wan had, and doubled back to the mirror to check his hair.

He headed back into the garage, where Padmé had sat herself on the hood of the car Obi-Wan was working on, chatting quietly with him as he cleaned their tools. When she saw that Anakin was back, she hopped down and waved a goodbye to Obi-Wan.

“Where are we going again?” asked Anakin as they walked back through the café, saying a quick goodbye to Plo — Ahsoka had gone home a few hours ago — and they headed out onto the street.

“That vegetarian place Eirtaé can’t get enough of,” she said.

“Oh, the one with the dope mushroom shawarma?” he said. “Sick.”

Padmé laughed. Out on the street, she took his hand in hers and started guiding him down the walkway, away from the shop. It was a nice night out, and the restaurant wasn’t far, so they walked hand in hand down the side streets, talking about Anakin’s day and hers, until they got to Abbot Kinney. Padmé had made reservations for them at six-thirty, so they hung out outside for a bit until the hostess told them their table was ready.

They ordered and Anakin leaned forward. 

“Guess what,” he said.

Padmé leaned forward too, smiling. “What?”

He smirked. “I’m pretty sure Obi-Wan hooked up with Jango Māhoe last night.”

Her eyes got huge. “Oh my God.”

“Yep.”

“Finally!” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Oh my God. I thought for sure he’d never pick up on it.”

“I know, right?” he said. “But Obi-Wan basically threw himself at him last night.”

“Seriously?” she asked, taking a sip of her water and then her wine.

“It was a very interesting turn of events,” he said. “I’d given Māhoe a ride from this work thing, and it was super late and we were closest to our place so I told him he could sleep on the couch, and I’d given him, like, the top secret Obi-Wan Kenobi intel to help him along on the ride, and then he didn’t even need it, ‘cause Obi-Wan was like, ‘Yeah you could take the couch, or you could join me in my bed.’”

Padmé put her hands on her cheeks. “Wow. I don’t think any of us had that in the betting pool.”

“Nope,” Anakin said. He drank some of his beer. “I think maybe he’s known the whole time, about everything, and has just been fucking with us.”

“That’s very possible,” she laughed. “He’s incredibly sneaky.”

They talked a little bit more about Obi-Wan and Māhoe — Padmé even got her phone out to text the girls the update in their group chat, which proceed to blow up in various levels of incredulity and excitement, Padmé reading choice texts aloud — and then about Padmé’s exam schedule. She had all papers due, and was slowly losing her ability to look at her computer screen, she joked, and had a handful of tests she was proctoring as a TA.

Their food came — Anakin’s shawarma and Padmé got the market special pizza — and they ate as Padmé talked more about the essays she was working on. After they finished and Anakin paid, they walked over to Salt & Straw for ice cream. Padmé, honey and lavender ice cream in hand, suggested they go for a walk down by the Canals and stare into people’s homes.

“Hey,” said Anakin a little while later, sipping at his rootbeer float and aiming for somewhere close to casual. “You heard about those highway robberies?”

“No,” she said. “Highway robberies? What, like, in a western?”

“Nah,” he said. “They’re, like, an actual robbery out on a highway. There’ve been a couple, I think. Most recent one was out by Barstow. They’ve been wild. Guys are using, like, harpoons or something and hijacking semis full of electronics and stuff.”

“Jesus,” said Padmé. Her eyes were wide. “Who would do that?”

Anakin shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t even know what they’d do with the merch they get, like, that’s gotta be super hot, right?”

“I guess,” she said slowly. “Have any of the drivers been hurt?”

“No,” he said. “Well, I mean, they’ve got a tranq or a taser or something. But the drivers aren’t shot or anything. Just get knocked out and tossed to the side of the road, and then the guys just, like, boost the semi, steal the stuff, and then leave it in a random alley somewhere. I wonder, you know, I wonder what would happen to someone who was doing that.”

“Well, they’ll be arrested for sure, once they’re caught,” she said.

“Yeah, of course. And after?”

“Well — I mean, I’m not sure. It depends on how many they did, and if anyone was really very badly hurt, and how much product they took. But they’d see a pretty long sentence, I imagine. Twenty, twenty-five. Felony charges, grand larceny, probably some others.” Padmé paused and then eyed him seriously, her dark brows drawn together. “Why do you ask?”

Anakin bit the side of his thumb. 

“Nothing, nothing,” he said. “Just — just some rumors going around about another garage, and I was curious, like, if it was true, what would happen to them.”

“Oh. Okay.” She took a bite of her ice cream but didn’t look quite settled.

“Hey,” he said. “I thought I heard Rabé say you had to procter one of her 101 exams for her when she got the flu last week.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Padmé, laughing. She waved her ice cream cone around. “Oh, Ani, it was so bad! I know they’re just babies, and it’s their first semester at college, but they were _so stupid.”_

Anakin laughed and she launched into the story, his questions forgotten for the moment.

The next night was the warehouse thing Fisto had heard about — a meet or a party or something set up, apparently, by guys from the crowd Obi-Wan and they used to run with when they were teenagers and who, he overheard Kit saying, they hadn’t hung out with in years now. Anakin was excited and nervous as they walked out of the house, Obi-Wan locking the door behind them. He had a good feeling about tonight.

The pride and joy of Quinlan Vos’s life was idling at the end of the walk, Vos behind the wheel and Kit Fisto lounging in the backseat. When Vos raced at a battle, he had an ‘98 Supra that he, Obi-Wan, and Fisto had fixed up when they were kids. He kept it in good shape, and won quite a few in it, but when he was just going out, or hitting a meet, the Supra was left parked in the garage.

Obi-Wan had been the one to find the ‘72 Pontiac Lemans, some ten years back, when he’d been out doing his thing at a scrap yard in Anaheim, trolling for parts for his Thunderbird. He’d seen it out of the corner of his eye, half under a tarp, covered in dust, and beat to absolute shit. No one other than an absolute nerd like Obi-Wan would have taken a second look at it and so it had gone years without anyone trying to figure out what it was; it took Obi-Wan fifteen minutes, half a thermos of Earl Grey, and the stack of cash he’d brought to buy his parts before he was calling Vos to come by with the shop’s tow truck. They’d dragged it back to Windu’s, hosed it down, and the thing was practically a lost cause, would need to be rebuilt from the ground up, the old rag top alone was more hole than canvas — but for Vos it had been love at first sight of the godawful and fuck-ugly bright yellow paint. Seeing the hearts practically swirling around his friend’s head, Obi-Wan had told Vos he’d sell it to him for half what he paid and a series of favors.

“Still paying off all those favors,” Vos would grumble good-naturedly whenever he told the story of the Lemans. Obi-Wan would merely sip his tea and smile, and everyone made note to never owe him any favors either.

Vos grinned at them. “C’mon, brothers, the night might be young but we still gotta get all the way over to West Covina.”

Anakin pointed at Fisto in the back seat and said, “Dude, I am not making that trip shoved into the back with you.”

“I’ll ride with Kit, Anakin,” said Obi-Wan, dropping a hand onto his shoulder and moving past. “Don’t worry.”

“I wouldn’t’ve wanted to snuggle with you back here anyway, Skywalker, you’re all elbows, you pointy bitch.” Fisto leaned forward and pushed the passenger seat into position so Obi-Wan could slide in behind it. “Also, Obi-Wan smells so much better than you or, like, anyone. Like freshly baked cookies and sarcasm.”

Anakin barked out a laugh and Vos snorted.

“Don’t let Māhoe hear you say that,” he said. “I don’t totally know what that guy’s deal is but if he thought you were stepping up on his man, Kit, I bet you’d been in for some sort of ass-whooping.”

“Oh, please. You know I only have eyes for Luminara. Not that you’re not absolutely dreamy, Kenobi, but the way that woman strips an engine,” he sighed. Then, Fisto grinned and threw an arm around Obi-Wan, dragging him in close, ruffling his hair as Obi-Wan sighed, long-suffering, and rolled his eyes. He continued, “Besides, if someone wants the business from this lunatic, who am I to stand in their way?”

Anakin manfully resisted the urge to announce that Māhoe had already probably gotten the business from Obi-Wan, possibly twice. It was going to be a solid hour this time of night to get to West Covina, and that was if everything was normal, and Anakin didn’t really want to have the back of his seat viciously kicked in three to five minute intervals the entire ride.

Traffic on the 10 was not great. It ended up taking them twenty minutes longer than Anakin had thought it would, but Vos had good taste in music and Fisto was working on a new Datsun that was being problematic, so they spent most of the ride discussing what needed fixing and figuring out where he’d get the parts.

The meet, or whatever, was in an old abandoned warehouse on the quarry. There were already a decent amount of cars lined up outside it, people milling around and looking at everyone’s rides.

Just on the outskirts of the rest of the cars, Māhoe was leaning up against a ‘04 Subaru Impreza. It was clean, blindingly white, and nondescript but for the sick, custom bronze rims.

They parked next to him and Vos barely had the car turned off before Anakin was out the door and popping the hood of Māhoe’s ride, looking inside and whistling. He asked, “Yo, man, where was this the other night? I’m not saying you would’ve beat me in it, but you would’ve done way better. Obi-Wan, come take a look at this thing.”

Obi-Wan came over and gave it a look. “It is very good.”

“Thanks.” Māhoe stuck his hands in his pockets. “I don’t like taking it out if I don’t have to. I still think it needs lots of work, and I’ll be honest, racing was never my thing. My family was big into it, back home. I always preferred just working on the cars.”

“Well, it’s looking real good,” said Anakin. “Anytime you want some help, I’d be happy to get under the hood with you. Or, I mean, I bet Obi-Wan would --”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan cut him off. Anakin frowned. He’d had a great innuendo about getting under Māhoe’s hood lined up. Obi-Wan continued, “Well, is this everyone coming tonight?”

“Yep,” said Vos, coming forward and throwing his arms around both Anakin and Obi-Wan’s shoulders. “How about we go in and see if any of your old friends are still rumbling around, OB? Maybe get up to some nonsense for old time’s sake.”

He ducked out from under Vos’s arm and moved a little closer to Māhoe, saying, “We’re not as young as we used to be, Quinlan.”

“Hey,” said Fisto. “I can still do all the same things we did at eighteen. It just takes me probably twice as long to recover.”

“C’mon, Obi-Wan,” said Vos. “You make us sound like we’re ancient. I know you’ve always been a sixty-five year old man trapped in the body of a teenager — or, I guess, now a thirty-whatever year old — but cut the rest of us some slack. We’ve got plenty of good partying years left in us. Am I right, Māhoe?”

“Sure,” he said. He nudged Obi-Wan with his elbow, hands still in his pockets. “Let me buy you a drink.”

Obi-Wan looked at him and then smiled. “I suppose.”

They turned and left. Anakin watched them weave their way through the cars and head into the warehouse, not touching but still close, just as they had stood in the kitchen side by side the other morning. _Gonna walk right into the freakin’ ocean,_ Anakin thought. He looked back over his shoulder at Fisto and Vos, to make sure they also saw.

“Twenty bucks,” said Vos, “says we stumble over them making out in the backseat of Māhoe’s Impreza later.”

“Sucker bet,” said Fisto. He nodded after them. “C’mon, let’s catch up.”

Together, the three of them followed a similar path through the cars and people and into the warehouse. Inside, it was loud and filled with people; it felt less like a typical meet than an oversized houseparty. The warehouse had probably once been a factory of some kind, industrial walkways lining the walls that people were hanging out on, leaning over the rails to shout down at friends and drinking out of red cups. Everything else inside, though, had been torn away, leaving a relatively empty main space, a DJ off in one corner spinning records and people dancing nearby. 

Anakin got separated pretty quickly from Fisto and Vos in the crush of people but he didn’t mind. He had a mission tonight, after all. He grabbed a drink to sip on but decided he wanted to stay clear-headed while fact finding and asking questions, and made his way through the crowd. He knew a few people here and there — some people from other garages but no one from Republic, who they were all closest to after Temple was sold — but people tended to recognize him and wanted to talk to him about racing.

He allowed himself to be drawn into conversations, listening to people talk and throwing in a question or two about the heists when it felt natural, but leaving soon after when it didn’t lead to anything. He needed to find the crew from Empire, if they were there, because he figured they would have the best info for him, if they had anything. 

After an hour or two of moving through the crowd from group to group, joking and talking and shooting the shit, he suddenly found himself face to face with Asaji Ventress, nearly knocking into one another as they both turned. She looked him up and down, darkly lipsticked mouth frowning.

“Skywalker,” she said, slowly, “you almost made me drop my beer.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I would’ve bought you a new one if I had.”

“You would have had to,” she said. They stared at each other for a moment and then Ventress smirked. Despite himself, Anakin smirked back. For all the shit he liked to give Vos about whatever the hell weird relationship he had with her, and the fact that she was probably Satan's mistress, Ventress was decent people. She was a hella talented racer, and a good mechanic, and Anakin had to respect that in a person. He thought maybe she respected him too but he wasn’t sure; she was, after all, known for her general and aggressive disdain for everyone she had ever met.

“Good race the other night,” she said after another moment of uncomfortable and prolonged eye contact.

“Thanks,” he said. “You know the fourth guy? I've been asking around, but no one knows him.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said at length. “New to the scene, just came in from Miami. Sheelal, is his name. They called him General Grievous.”

Anakin snorted despite himself and the corner of Ventress’s dark mouth ticked up in what could be genuine mirth.

“I know,” she said. “Come on. I’ll introduce you, if you want.”

“Sure,” he said, taking a drink to cover the fact that he was about to start grinning wildly. _Here we go._ “Why not?”

Ventress nodded her head and turned into the crowd, not checking to see if Anakin was following her. He trailed after her, weaving through the people that parted naturally for Ventress and the cold aura of “don’t fuck with me” she tended to exude with her blank stare, shaved and tattooed head, and toweringly high heels. A few people tried to stop Anakin but he waved them off. This was the lead he was waiting for, he knew it.

In a corner of the warehouse, furthest away from the DJ and the dancers crowding around him, the brothers Opress and a tank of a guy Anakin had never met but recognized from behind the wheel of the fourth car were standing in the shadows. Big Opress was leaned against the wall, eyes tracking slowly through the crowd, and Little Opress was on his other side, animatedly talking about something. He fell silent when Ventress, and Anakin, arrived.

“Sheelal,” she said her slow drawl. “This is Skywalker, from Windu’s shop.”

He looked Anakin over. He opened his mouth, coughed twice, and said in a rough, scratchy voice, “Skyline R34 GT-R?”

“That’s me,” said Anakin.

The guy — Sheelal — gave another wheezy sounding cough. “Mhm,” he said.

Anakin bit the inside of his cheek. _Well, this was going to be awkward,_ he thought. He steeled himself, trying to think about what angle he could take to see if he could get them talking about Empire and what Palpatine was up to, when Little Opress turned suddenly and lit up when he saw him.

“Yo, that was great driving the other night!” he said. His brother glared, and Sheelal gave another rough cough, turning away to talk to Big Opress. Little Opress didn’t seem to care, coming over to where Anakin and Ventress were standing at the edge of their group. “You really tore it up!”

“Oh,” he said, startled. “Thanks, bro.”

“You haven’t been to any battles lately, they were getting kinda boring without you, man,” Little Opress said, smiling. Ventress rolled her eyes and sipped at her beer, turning to stare out into the crowd and ignore them.

“Yeah, it’s been rough,” said Anakin. He paused, thinking, and then decided to just go for it. What did he have to lose? He said, “You know Dooku?”

Little Opress frowned. “Who?”

“He’s this cop,” he said. “Assistant chief, high up there. He’s got beef with Windu from way back when he was a mechanic at Temple with the old man, and with all this shit with the heists, Dooku’s been all up in our business.”

“Oh, shit, man.” He whistled softly. “That’s wild.”

“Yeah,” Anakin said. “So we’re keeping, like, a low profile, ‘cause he thinks Windu’s mixed up in it somehow, even though that stiff’s straighter than anyone else in the scene, I swear.”

Little Opress laughed and shook his head. “That blows, man. Sorry you guys are catching that heat.”

Anakin shrugged. “I mean, what can you do?”

“They’re crazy though, right?” he said. “Those heists, I mean.”

“Oh, for sure.” He paused again, draining the last of his beer. “They’ve got — man, what did I hear? Like a frigging harpoon or something? They fire that into the car and then taze the driver and make off with the merch.”

“Tranqed ‘em,” said Little Opress. He leaned in close to Anakin. “And they’re crossbows, with grappling wire. You know. I heard.”

Anakin stared at Little Opress, regretting that he’d just finished his beer. The only time Anakin had ever heard about crossbows being modified to use with grappling wire during the heists was when Obi-Wan, tripping balls on painkillers, had outlined his plan to Windu while Anakin listened in the shadows and then when Anakin told Palpatine about the plan as if it were his own. The papers never mentioned how the hijackers go into the trucks, just that they had. The only people who would know —

“Shit,” he said, a little over loud. He glanced quickly at Ventress, who was staring into the crowd still, and the wheezy Sheelal guy, who was still talking to Big Opress, busy coughing up a lung in between every other word, it sounded like. He said, “I mean, shit, that’s wild, bro.”

Little Opress grinned. “Sick, right?”

“Sick,” he agreed.

“I mean, not like I’m dialed in or whatever,” said Little Opress. “But, like, Sav hears a lot of stuff, and Sheelal’s got these friends — anyway, I know you said Windu runs a clean shop but, well, if I heard about, you know, a _job_ or something, would you be interested? People are always looking for, you know, a bomb wheelman for shit. No guarantees! But I could put in a good word for you?”

“Huh,” said Anakin. He gripped his empty beer cup tighter and tucked the other one in his pocket; they were shaking. “Maybe, man, I could be into —”

From the center of the warehouse, there was suddenly shouting. People looked around, whispering to each other. Someone said, “Is it the cops?”

“Shit,” said Ventress. She knocked back her drink, tossed it aside, and turned to the others. “We should bounce.”

“Hold on!” Little Opress darted into the crowd and was back a minute later. “We’re fine! It’s not the cops, looks like some guys are about to get into it, though.”

“Any of the usuals?” asked Big Opress.

“Someone said it was a couple of white guys,” he said. “No one knew exactly who.”

Vos’s suddenly popped up over the shoulder of Ventress, locs bouncing as he gave Ventress a long once over before he grinned at Anakin. “Yo, Skywalker, let’s go!”

“Why?” Anakin frowned. He was just about to get somewhere with this crew.

“You’ve always wanted to see Obi-Wan fight, right?” he asked.

“Wait,” said Anakin, eyes widening.

Ventress, who was eyeing Vos like a cat would eye a particularly annoying mouse, straightened up. “It’s Kenobi? He’s fighting again?”

“One show only,” said Vos. He held out his elbow to her. “No encores. Care to join us?”

“Love to,” she said. She hooked her arm in his. 

Vos, throwing a wink towards the group, turned and began to steer him and Ventress through the crowd. Anakin practically bounded after them. He got a lead on the crew running the heists _and_ he was going to watch Obi-Wan beat the shit out of some guy? This was officially the best night of his _life._

They cut through the crowd, heading towards the center of the commotion. Anakin looked around as they went, using his superior height — though Ventress came close to him in those vicious heels of hers — to see if he could see Fisto’s distinctive braids, or Māhoe. When he spotted Fisto, he tapped Vos on the shoulder and directed him.

Fisto was already standing with Māhoe, near the edge of the circle that had formed. In the center of it, some white guy Anakin had never seen before and Obi-Wan stood opposite each other. Obi-Wan had stripped out of the shirt he’d worn, leaving him bare chested, to the obvious delight of many in the crowd. The other guy ripped his shirt off too, tossing it into the crowd. Someone cheered. He cracked his neck and smirked at Obi-Wan, who calmly inclined his head. The guy charged at Obi-Wan and he quickly sidestepped him, sending him headlong into the crowd which pushed him back into the circle. The guy tried the same move again and Obi-Wan slipped out of his way again.

It went in like that for a few minutes: the guy coming after Obi-Wan and Obi-Wan dodging out of his way, the guy getting progressively redder and redder in the face. Obi-Wan barely looked like he had a hair out of place.

“What the fuck happened?” asked Anakin, riveted.

Fisto sipped his beer and shrugged, “Not sure. I’d just met up with him and Māhoe, and the guy was already there, getting in Obi-Wan's face, and Obi-Wan just said, all polite and shit, that if he’d like, he could show him just what fighting him was like.”

“He called him a cocksucking faggot,” said Māhoe. His arms were corssed over his chest, Obi-Wan’s shirt folded over one arm, and he was staring fixedly at the fighters with a look on his face that suggested they were all probably lucky he wasn’t the one in the fight, because otherwise there’d be a murder.

There probably would still be a murder, thought Anakin. He said, “Yikes, Obi-Wan does not like that word.”

“He said that too,” said Fisto. “Right before he took off his shirt and started to bare knuckle box a homophobe.”

“Good for him,” said Ventress. She sounded genuinely approving. “I hope he breaks his larynx.”

In the circle, the unknown white guy was swinging wildly at Obi-Wan, who continued to expertly dodge him while sneaking in here and there to land some intense looking blows to the guy’s torso. He got in one particularly vicious sucker punch that made the guy double over and Obi-Wan grabbed him close to knee him viciously in the chin.

The guy spun away from him, spitting blood, and tripped into the crowd, which pushed him back towards the fight once more. Obi-Wan was waiting at the fringes, bouncing back and forth on his feet. He shook his hands out and grinned. The crowd fucking lost it, cheering Obi-Wan’s name. Ventress and Vos were probably the loudest, Ventress screaming, “Kill him, Kenobi!”

While it made Obi-Wan grin a little harder — and a little more manically, if Anakin was being honest — it only served to infuriate the other guy. He practically roared and flung himself at Obi-Wan, catching Obi-Wan around the chest and bearing him to the ground. He got one good punch in towards Obi-Wan’s face, Obi-Wan's head snapping against the concrete flooring. Anakin and his group all flinched as one, and Fisto put a hand on Māhoe’s arm when he made to move forward.

The punch, however, did not stop Obi-Wan. In fact, it appeared that getting Obi-Wan on the ground was a huge tactical mistake by the unknown white guy. Before Anakin could even blink, Obi-Wan had somehow gotten himself wrapped around the guy, his thighs clamped tight around his neck and the guy’s arm stretched back towards him. There was a sickening pop, heard even over the roar of the crowd, as the shoulder was dislocated and the man went limp in his grip, either from pain or simply lack of oxygen from Obi-Wan’s strong legs, he didn’t know.

Next to him, Vos downed his beer. “I mean, if you’re gonna go — what a way to go.”

“Hope this doesn’t awaken anything in you,” Anakin said to Māhoe who was watching the action avidly.

“Yeah, mate,” he said, “that ship has sailed.”

The crowd had gone absolutely apeshit again, screaming and cheering and stopping their feet as Obi-Wan stood up and dusted his hands on his jeans. A few guys that were probably friends of the unknown white guy went to grab him from where he was stirring blearily on the ground, dragging him off; and then, as if a spell was broken, more people poured into the empty circle to crowd around Obi-Wan. Ventress herself looked about fifteen seconds away from joining them, her eyes gleaming and wild. Anakin was right there with her. He'd always heard about Obi-Wan fighting, but this was unlike anything he could have ever imagined. He had fucking _decimated_ that guy!

“C’mon,” said Vos. “Let’s go rescue your boy, Māhoe. We’ll head out and you can get nasty with him in the Impreza.”

Ventress looked at Māhoe with distinct interest. “Mhm — are you Kenobi’s new boytoy?”

Māhoe side-eyed her. “What’s it to you?”

She raised the hand that wasn’t still resting proprietarily on Vos’s arm. “Nothing at all,” she said, “merely admiring his taste.”

He stared at her for a second longer and then stalked off. They all followed after him, heading into the crowd to collect Obi-Wan from the many admirers that had sprung up around him. He turned from some woman, who was touching his bicep, when Fisto whistled sharply. Obi-Wan smiled — his teeth were bloody — and extracted himself to head their way.

Several people tried to stop him, thumping him on the shoulders and shouting, but Māhoe cut through them and tucked himself close to Obi-Wan, shepherding him out of the crush of people with a firm hand between his shoulder blades. Obi-Wan sent a tired-looking but grateful smile his way and allowed himself to be steered.

“C’mon, OB,” said Fisto, gesturing. “Let’s go get you cleaned up, get that shirt back on you. You’re traumatizing Anakin.”

“The horror, the horror,” he said with a grin. “I’m a changed boy, seeing your chest hair and bloody knuckles and shit. To say nothing of what you’ve done to Māhoe!”

Obi-Wan sighed, though, and said, “I am truly sorry you all had to see that. I apologize for my loss of control.”

“Dude,” said Anakin, sliding closer to his foster brother to jostle his shoulder gently. “It’s fine, bro, I’m joking. It was pretty badass, the way you smoked that homophobe.”

Obi-Wan sighed again. “I do hate that word.”

“I know,” he said.

They left the warehouse, Ventress still arm and arm with Vos, and made their way back to their cars silently. Once there, Māhoe popped open his trunk so Obi-Wan could sit on the bumper and watch him dig around for something. He emerged with a particularly heavy-duty looking first aid kit that Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow at. Māhoe shrugged, sitting down next to him and opening the kit in his lap.

“I have a five year old,” he said, “who is convinced he’s invincible. Doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

“That’s fair,” said Fisto.

Vos leaned up against his own car and said thoughtfully, “When I was five, I thought I could fly.”

“How’d that go for you?” asked Māhoe as he set one hand on Obi-Wan’s jaw, angling it to the light from the street lamps, checking his eyes quickly. He slid the hand on his jaw back around to cup the back of Obi-Wan's skull gently. He flinched a little and Māhoe let go, ripping open an alcohol wipe and moving to carefully clean the cut across the bridge of Obi-Wan's nose. Obi-Wan closed his eyes.

“Not great,” Vos was saying. He winked at Ventress, who rolled her eyes and perched on the hood of Vos’s Lemans. “I jumped off the roof of my nana’s garage and broke my leg in three places.”

“And then got your ass whooped by nana,” said Fisto.

“Oh, of course. That was worse than the broken leg.”

Māhoe had put a butterfly bandage over Obi-Wan’s nose and had gone on to attend to his knuckles, which were torn open in places and already covered in dark, purpling bruises. Obi-Wan held them out, away from his body, so Māhoe could pour a tiny bottle of distilled water over them.

“I forgot,” he said, quiet, “what this did to my hands.”

“Yeah,” said Māhoe, dabbing the knuckles now with a new antiseptic wipe. “You’re gonna be well stiff. Might think about taking a few days next week.”

“Oh, no,” said Obi-Wan. “I’ll be perfectly able to work on Monday. I always was.”

Māhoe gently wrapped gauze around the left hand and then the right. His thumb was lingering in the inside of Obi-Wan’s wrist as he said, “I’m sure you were. But you should take better care of yourself.”

“It’s like watching your parents flirt,” whispered Anakin, moving to lean up against Vos’s car with him.

“Yeah,” said Vos. “If one of them was an ex-cage fighting lunatic.”

Fisto, having just taken a sip of his beer, snorted it back out of his nose.

“You fought good,” said Ventress. “Never thought I’d see it again.”

Obi-Wan, who had been busy staring in a frankly soulful manner at Māhoe, turned to look at Ventress. He grimaced and said, “I never thought I’d been doing it again.”

“Well, you fought good,” she repeated, “and looked good doing it.”

Māhoe shifted to stand just a little in front of Obi-Wan, who rolled his eyes and finally shrugged his shirt back on. He gingerly touched the cut on the bridge of his nose and said, “Well, I suspect I should call it a night.”

“That’s probably fair,” said Anakin.

Obi-Wan reached out and touched Māhoe’s wrist. “Would you mind terribly giving me a ride home?”

Vos opened his mouth and Anakin immediately and with great prejudice stepped on his foot. From the muffled grunt that slipped out of his mouth, and Ventress’s low chuckle from the front of the Lemans, Fisto had done the same on his other side.

As if sensing that nonsense was afoot, Obi-Wan stared them down, daring them to say anything. Anakin was fine with that; he liked to store up as much material as he could to deploy it strategically at a later time.

“It would be the gentlemanly thing to do,” commented Ventress and Anakin suddenly wondered if he was going to need to befriend her. She seemed fully committed to giving Obi-Wan shit at every opportunity she could, and Anakin really liked that in a person.

Before Obi-Wan could reply to her, however, she hopped off the hood of the car and was pulling her phone out of her back pocket, glancing at the screen. She said, “Well, it’s been a pleasure, gentlemen, but I’m afraid I also must be going.”

“Oh.” Vos somehow managed to both frown sadly and leer at Ventress at the same time, which was genuinely impressive. “Well, text me, will you? It’s been too long.”

She had been making her way from the car but stopped and looked over her shoulder. She smirked and then kept walking.

A ‘95 Dodge Charger, matte black, pulled up just shy of her and Little Opress hopped out of the backseat to hold the door open for Ventress, who slid in. Little Opress looked like he was about to go back in after her when he caught sight of Anakin and lit up, smiling.

“One sec,” he shouted at the Charger and then bounded over, calling, “Yo, Skywalker!”

“Hey, man,” said Anakin. “You headed out too?”

“Yeah, we got a thing,” Little Opress said with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, you being serious earlier?”

“About,” he started and then Little Opress nodded. He nodded too. “Oh, yeah, I was, for sure.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and handed it to Anakin. “Cool, cool, cool. So, like, gimme your number, bro! I’ll hit you up, like, if I hear anything about a new job or whatever.”

“Yeah,” said Anakin again, steadily ignoring the eyes he felt on the back of his neck as he typed his number into Little Opress’s phone and then texted himself. Obi-Wan, no doubt, though like hell Anakin was ever going to listen that hypocrite telling him to not do anything reckless ever again. He was apparently the king of the reckless — the reckless _and_ the dangerous. Man, Anakin was going to hold this night over his head for the rest of their lives. He continued to Little Opress, “That’d be fresh, man, thanks.”

“No problem!”

“Little brother!” shouted Big Opress from the Charger. He was driving and he’d pulled himself through the window to look out over the roof. “Let’s go!”

“Coming!” he shouted back. He held out his fist to Anakin, who bumped it. “Catch ya later, Skywalker!”

“Later.”

Little Opress jogged away, hopped in the car, and Big Opress sped out of the lot, kicking up gravel and dirt in his wake.

Anakin turned back to the guys. Obi-Wan was looking at him, but no one else was.

“Well,” said Vos, heading towards the driver’s side of the Lemans, “I feel like it’s probably time to call it for the rest of us too, right? Before Obi-Wan here decides to drop gloves with someone else. OB, you gonna catch that ride with Māhoe?”

Obi-Wan looked up at Māhoe, who smiled down at him. He said, “If you’re still amenable.”

“Let me just let my auntie know,” he said, pulling his phone out and starting to type. “She’s watching Boba for me, I said I’d be back around midnight to pick him up.”

“You know I wouldn’t mind making a stop,” Obi-Wan said, finally standing.

Māhoe was looking at his phone still, and his smile fell away slowly at whatever he was reading. Then, he winced.

“Oh, dear,” said Obi-Wan, soft.

“Yeah,” he said. “Looks like Taun We’s in the middle of dealing with a full scale meltdown. Kid’s refusing to go to bed until I get there. I’m sorry but I think I need to rescind my offer.”

“Of course. Another time,” said Obi-Wan. He touched Māhoe’s elbow with one of his bandaged hands and they stood there, staring at one another.

Vos leaned on his horn and they both jumped. Fisto, already lounging in the back seat, chortled.

“Yes, yes,” said Obi-Wan, dropping his hand.

Māhoe caught it though and used to to pull Obi-Wan gently towards him. He kissed him softly on the corner of his mouth, just as he had the other morning, and then tipped their foreheads together.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, low.

“Yes,” said Obi-Wan again. They broke apart, Māhoe heading for the driver’s seat of the Impreza and Obi-Wan back to the Lemans. Anakin was holding the seat back for him and made a sweeping arm gesture towards the back bench seat. Obi-Wan stared flatly at him as he passed and climbed in.

Māhoe left first, honking his horn once as he passed, and Vos pulled out after him. They all sat in silence in the car until they were cruising down the 10 and Obi-Wan sighed loudly.

“All right,” he said. “Please say whatever it is you so desperately wish to say, all of you.”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” said Fisto severely, “how dare you assume we’re going to make fun of you for that beautiful display of love in an abandoned warehouse parking lot after you dislocated a homophobe’s shoulder and left him a greasy little smear on the ground!!”

“Yeah,” Anakin said, turning around in his seat. “Why would we tease you for something like that? It’s not like we didn’t already know that your problem wasn’t that you didn’t have emotions but you had too many of them. Anyway, what do you think he’d like better — dad or pop?”

“I’d go with pop,” offered Vos. “Jango Māhoe strikes me as the type of man who only likes to be called “daddy” in a very specific set of circumstances.”

“Oh,” Fisto said as Anakin nodded seriously, “that is very valid.”

Obi-Wan crossed his arms and sank back into the seat. The tips of his ears were bright red. He said, “This is going to be an excruciating car ride.”

They had off the next day. After he woke up, Anakin laid in bed, staring up at the ceiling for a while, before he pulled out his phone to text Padmé. He got up to shower eventually, and then decided he was hungry, so he made his way to the kitchen to see what he could eat. Maybe there were some leftovers from Māhoe’s sweet potato hash still.

Obi-Wan was sat before his laptop at the table, looking at cars on Hemmings. The blow to his face last night had left him with a particularly impressive shiner on his left eye, and he’d take off the bandages to his knuckles, scabbed and purpled in the soft daylight. Oblivious to Anakin in the doorway, he clicked on an image of Buick LeSabre — old, from what Anakin could see, probably late 70s judging by the look of the FR layout and overall length of the front of the sedan. Paint-job was shit — an old green so washed out it looked grey — but the body was in good shape.

He draped himself over Obi-Wan’s back and reached out to click the next image in the slideshow. “Dope ride. ‘76, ‘77? When did you decide you wanted a car?”

“‘70. And I don’t.” He snapped the laptop shut. “Are you done?”

Anakin stood up, raising his hands. That was about as close to Obi-Wan telling him to mind his fucking business as he would ever get, so Anakin would mind his fucking business. Last night probably had stressed him out way more than he let on.

“Wanna go to the shop?” he asked. “Dex said he found that part for me for R2, I was gonna go pick it up.”

“Sure,” said Obi-Wan. “There’s some paperwork I’ve been meaning to do for Mace.”

They locked up the house and loaded themselves into R2-D2. Anakin rolled the windows down and Obi-Wan leaned his face into the sun, eyes closed, as they drove. He stayed in the car when they got to Dex’s and Anakin hopped out, exchanging hellos and how ya doing’s before collecting his part, and heading back to the car. 

Anakin circled around the back of the shop and took R2 into the garage. He and Obi-Wan hopped out, him heading towards the locker room to shrug into his coveralls and Obi-Wan to Windu’s office. They both stopped at Windu’s office, though, because Windu was inside, staring into the distance, frowning.

“Aren’t you off today?” he asked when he finally noticed them, a full minute later, lurking in the doorway. He barely seemed to register Obi-Wan’s black eye.

“I wanted to work on R2 here,” Anakin said.

Obi-Wan was frowning now too. “I thought you were visiting Depa and Yoda up north this weekend.”

“I was.” He grimaced. “I will. You didn’t see the news?”

Anakin blinked, his stomach practically doing back-flips, and Obi-Wan shook his head, slowly.

“There was another heist last night,” Windu said. His frown grew deeper, harder. He added, “The driver was shot.”

Obi-Wan sank heavily into the chair in front of Windu’s desk, hand on his chin, and Anakin, furious, said “Shit,” even as he thought, excited, _It’s them_. _It was fucking them._

Windu didn’t make them go into lockdown again but it was a near thing. Instead, he insisted they close ranks around each other further, only going to meets and battles in as big a group as possible, and limiting other outside curriculars. He said that last thing while looking directly at Obi-Wan’s still vibrant black eye the Monday after the latest heist, and Obi-Wan had studiously stared at the wall just behind Windu’s shoulder. 

But there’d been one of Dooku’s little plainclothes assholes at the counter for lunch the day after that, and then the day after that too; so they’d all gone along with it, maybe grumbling a little, but ultimately peacefully.

Anakin felt like his phone with Little Opress’s number in the contacts was burning a whole through his pocket. It was radio silence, though, so he’d gone about his day and then his week normally. He had a beer on the back porch with Obi-Wan every other night, teasing him about Māhoe and their moony-eyed stares over their sopes and tacos and engine blocks, and texted Padmé in between her classes and essays. He worked on R2 and other people’s cars, raced twice, and took Padmé on a date down at the Santa Monica Pier where he ate so much cotton candy he nearly puked after the roller coaster and Padmé laughed so hard she was crying. Life was good, and it went on, and Anakin could almost convince himself that maybe things weren’t so terrible. Maybe everything would blow over.

A month after the punch-up at the warehouse and a truck driver getting shot in the course of a high speed heist, Little Opress finally texted.

> LITTLE OPRESS 5.35pm  
>  hey man — got a job tmrw nite — u in?

Anakin, beneath the body of some finance bro’s Corvette, stared up at the message. The shop wasn’t quiet by any means — Adi had cranked up some radio station that was playing a bunch of hits from when she’d been a teenager in the DR and Vos was warbling badly along with it, Fisto laughing — but the world felt muted to Anakin. He wondered at how his hands were still steady as he typed back.

> ANAKIN 5.38pm  
>  yeah, brah, for sure

He locked his phone and slipped it back down into the pocket of his coveralls. He comforted himself with the thought that it would probably be small potatoes they were testing him out on, and he just needed the smallest, baby in with these guys and then —

Then he’d figure out how to shut them down, and how to keep Windu’s Autobody and Café out of this mess once and for all.

The next night, Anakin borrowed one of the random cars behind the shop — he wasn’t about to get his boy R2-D2 mixed up in this shit — and drove over to Burbank, to the address Little Opress had sent him. It was somebody’s house, he saw when he got there, and Little Opress was waiting outside for him, sitting on the stoop.

He jumped up and headed over, saying, “Just park on a side street, we’ll take Sav’s car the rest of the way.”

“Jesus,” laughed Anakin. “This is intense.”

“Trust me,” said Little Opress. “You’ll be glad we take this seriously.”

“Sure,” he said, a little skeptically.

Forty-five minutes later, though, Anakin sat behind the wheel of a modified ‘98 Honda Civic, Little Opress in the passenger seat clutching a crossbow with a grappling line attached to it, following two other, identical ‘98 Honda Civics — one driven by the wheezy Sheelal, the other by Ventress — and a third behind him — driven by Big Opress. He thought, in a voice that sounded not unlike Obi-Wan, that he was actually rather glad they _did_ take all this so seriously.

“You know,” Anakin said, impressively steady, considering he’d gone from planning to aid and a betting a car jacking to being an accessory to what had the potential to escalate quickly into felony grand larceny and maybe murder, “I sort of figured I’d be doing a milk run or something first. Maybe boost a few cars, steal some tires, that kind of thing.”

To his credit, Little Opress flashed him a sort of abashed smile. “Sorry, bro,” he said, “our other wheelman broke his wrist last time. We thought he’d be all healed up before we hit up another one of these, so we needed a replacement real quick when we got word about this truck, and I’d spent, like, three weeks convincing them you’d be down with us for something else, so that when the boss brought you up — well, you know, fate or whatever, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Fate.”

He drummed his fingers on the wheel.

“You nervous?” asked Little Opress.

“Nah,” said Anakin, with more bravado than he felt. “It’s like any other race, right?”

“Right! Dude, you’re gonna get such a rush, it’s like so sick.”

“Yeah,” he said again with a nod, staring out at the road. There was a little GPS on the dash with a route for Anakin to follow, the tinny voice silent for now as he continued to follow the 5 northward. He asked, “So, uh, who’s the boss? That Sheelal guy?”

Little Opress shook his head. “No way. I mean, I guess for, like, the actual execution. But the guy who came up with the plan — well, only Sheelal’s actually met him. He recruited him from Miami and everything. Me and Sav and Ventress have never even met the guy. I don't think Sheelal’s _actually_ either but — not that he’s not legit, of course! But yeah.”

“Ah.” Well, he thought, at least he had that going for him. If they got caught, they couldn’t roll on Palpatine — it _had_ to be Palpatine — but that also meant that there was no reason for Palpatine to roll on Anakin and therefore Obi-Wan to get the pressure off himself.

He glanced out of the corner of his eye at both the GPS they had set up and Little Opress, but Little Opress seemed focused on staring out the window, practically bouncing in his seat. He kept his right hand on the wheel and dug, as frantically and as furtively as he could, for his phone. 

After a few minutes of pawing at himself, Anakin got his phone out. He unlocked it and quickly got to his message thread with Obi-Wan. Typing with his thumb, keeping his eyes on the road, he fired off a text as quick as he could.

 _Shit has gotten real,_ he typed, _prepare bail money._

He glanced down to make sure he hit send then locked his phone and stuck it beneath his thigh. Fatalistically he thought that, at least if the cops pulled them over — God, he’d never wanted so badly to see a cop in his whole life as he did right now, how was that for some bullshit — he’d be able to take the rap for Obi-Wan. He’d passed it off as his idea anyway, all those years ago.

Anakin drove, fingers gripped on the wheel. 

Ten minutes passed in tense silence. At least it probably wasn’t unusual, he figured, a little manic, when one was driving to the scene of a planned high-speed heist. He wondered when the fuck they were going to get to this goddamn truck.

His phone vibrated beneath his thigh. Anakin didn’t jerk the wheel of the car but only because he was a professional.

Little Opress turned to stare at him as he answered. “Skywalker.”

“Anakin,” said Obi-Wan, posh and quiet and, oh, God, he was going to be so disappointed with him. Even bringing up the cage fighting shit wasn’t going to keep him in the clear on this one. “My dear, what on earth does ‘chit he’d gotten resident yelp it bail novey’ mean?”

“Uh,” he said. He flicked his eyes towards Little Opress, who frowned at him. Anakin pulled his phone to his shoulder and whispered, “My brother, guy trouble, you know how it is.”

Little Opress made a face like he did not know how guy trouble was. People could be so close-minded, he thought.

“Hey, sorry,” said Anakin. “Um, you know — it’s, well, it’s like, there you are, minding your business, and there he is, minding his, and then all of a sudden — wham! You’re there together, you know, speeding down the highway of, uh, life or whatever and you’re in this unmarked car, and he’s got a, like, uh, he’s got a harpoon or some shit and you’re all, babe no, and then he’s like —”

“Anakin,” interrupted Obi-Wan, slowly, and Anakin just knew he had his eyes shut and was pinching the bridge of his nose, “what _have_ you done?”

“What _haven’t_ I done?” he hissed back, slightly hysterical. Little Opress eyed him again. He continued, “I mean, in the grand scheme of things, what’s a little, you know, _Bullitt_ adjacent action?”

“Is he in the middle of a car chase?” someone asked Obi-Wan faintly. Māhoe, thought Anakin.

“No,” said Obi-Wan. “I suspect it is much worse.”

Anakin didn’t have a chance to answer as the radio that they’d thrust at him when he’d been stuck behind the wheel of the Civic — and that he’d subsequently dropped into the cup holder so he could have a nice, quiet panic attack — crackled to life. 

Sheelal wheezed and coughed. Then he said, “Truck two miles out.”

In the distance, growing closer, was an eighteen wheeler. Anakin was barely aware of his phone slipping out of his hand, Obi-Wan and Māhoe’s voices growing ever fainter as it dropped to the footwell of the car.

“Skywalker,” Sheelal croaked out. “We’ll swarm the truck, get it to slow down, throw him off. When I signal you, you’ll pull forward and get in front of the truck so Feral can board.”

Big Opress’s Civic sped up and passed Anakin and Little Opress to join Ventress and Sheelal as they closed in around the truck. Anakin watched as they sped around it, weaving and dodgingt. It took perhaps five minutes, maybe less, before the truck driver began to realize something was wrong — that the Honda Civics that had come up on the same stretch of road as the driver were not just fellow travelers.

An eighteen wheeler didn't have much in terms of protecting itself from hijackers. It barely had any maneuverability, especially when three Civics were buzzing it, circling in and around it. Ventress even sent her Civic beneath the chassis of the trailer as Anakin watched, slingshotting herself up the other side when the driver wasn’t watching. But the driver still had the advantage of sheer size and when the cab swerved, the trailer had a moment of stillness before it fishtailed, whipping wildly to the left as the driver tried to avoid Ventress’s sudden appearance on that side.

Unfortunately, Big Opress wasn’t prepared for the trailer to swing towards him. It clipped him and the momentum was just enough to send his Civic spinning off the road, crashing with a boom and a massive cloud of dust.

“Fuck,” whispered Anakin.

Beside him, Little Opress hadn’t seen what happened. He was jamming a motorcycle helmet on his head with one hand and hitting the button for the sunroof with the other

“Now, Skywalker!” wheezed Sheelal.

The other two Civics left had finally forced the truck to slow down some, distracting the driver, and Anakin gripped the wheel, speeding up to put the car in front of the truck, pacing himself with it. He felt sort of numb but also like he was shaking. Was this what having an out of body experience was like? He was pretty sure this was what having an out of body experience was like.

“Hold steady!” someone called over the radio.

He watched, wide-eyed, as Little Opress picked up the crossbow and stood up through the sunroof. He hefted the crossbow, took aim, and shot it through the window of the truck. Then he quickly reloaded, this time with a bolt that had the grappling wire attached, and shot it through the broken glass of the windshield. Little Opress climbed out of the sunroof and Anakin dropped the car’s speed just a little, slipping back closer to the truck, and Little Opress was on the front of the truck.

“Drop back, Skywalker,” ordered Sheelal. He coughed. “To your left!”

Anakin sped up again and dropped back, just in time to be out of the way as the truck jerked wildly off to the right. Little Opress went tumbling off the side of the hood but his rigging kept him from becoming a smear on the pavement. He swung into the side of the truck, bouncing off it once before clinging on. He shouted something that Anakin could barely hear over the roar of their engines.

He scrambled to get hold of the radio and hollered into it, “He’s stuck in the rigging!” 

“Ventress!” snapped Sheelal.

In the rear view, Anakin watched a Civic zip forward, buzzing the truck again, trying to distract the driver and buy Little Opress some time. Anakin tried to get closer to the car too but the driver was trying too hard to both shake Little Opress off and run Ventress off the road. He couldn’t get close without running the risk of getting knocked off.

“Anakin!” shouted Obi-Wan tinnily, and Anakin startled. He hadn’t realized they were still connected after he’d dropped it. “Anakin, answer me! Are you okay?”

He groped awkwardly for his cell where it had fallen down at his feet, one hand still on the wheel, eyes glued to Little Opress as he clung to the side of the truck. He was keeping the car on the road out of sheer muscle memory at this point. 

There was an awful, metallic scraping noise and the truck straightened out. Anakin could see, from just beneath the truck’s undercarriage, Ventress’s Civic get pushed into the shoulder, kicking up dust as it spun out into the desert, same as Big Opress’s had done.

“Fuck,” said Sheelal. He said, “Skywalker, the cops are on their way, bail out,” and before Anakin could even ask, the radio cut out into silence.

“Anakin!” shouted Obi-Wan again.

He finally got a grip on his phone.

“Obi-Wan,” he said, hitting the speaker phone blindly. “Oh, god, Ben — ”

“Anakin,” he said, alarmed. “What is — ”

“I figured it out,” he told him in a rush. “I figured it out, Obi-Wan, the heists — it’s all my fucking fault — I started this! It’s all my fault, and I thought if I found out who was doing it, I’d be able to stop it and no one should have to know we were involved and I thought that Little Opress was just going to have me come to some fucking chop shop or something — not actually be a get away driver on the real fucking job — ”

“Skywalker, are you fucking there?” shouted Māhoe faintly from Obi-Wan’s phone. “Are you at the fucking heist?”

On the outside of the truck, Little Opress’s rigging had gotten even more tangled with his line and the driver was leaning out the cab of the truck. The barrel of the .45 caught the bright beams of Anakin’s headlights.

He yelled, “Opress! Look out!”

“Anakin!” shouted Obi-Wan. 

Opress jerked in his rigging, and screamed.

“Anakin,” said Obi-Wan.

“Fuck,” breathed Anakin. He had to — shit, he had to help him. “Fuck, Obi-Wan — they’ve all left and Litte Opress is — I have to help him, so, please — tell Padmé I love her, and also I love you, okay, you’re the best brother I could have asked for, and tell Mace that he was the world’s most okayest dad —”

“Anakin,” he said, terribly calm, “look out the window, you fucking clown.”

He did.

Beside him, instead of a matching Civic, was Māhoe’s pristine Impreza. Māhoe was behind the wheel, concentrating hard, and Obi-Wan was in the passenger seat, half leaning out of the open window, phone still held to his ear.

“How,” said Anakin.

“You need to get out of here!” shouted Māhoe. “The cops are on their way!”

“Fuck that,” said Anakin. “The driver’s got a gun! He shot Little Opress! We have to help him!”

Obi-Wan flashed him a split-second, crazy-eyed glare that carried a new weight now that Anakin had seen him choke a dude out between his thighs. He turned back to Māhoe, said something Anakin couldn’t make out over the roaring of the wind, and then Māhoe was speeding ahead of the Civic, angling in close to the truck.

Obi-Wan was climbing out of the window of the Impreza and onto the roof.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” screamed Anakin, watching as his brave, brilliant, and absolutely batshit insane foster brother launched himself off the top of the Impreza and onto the side of the truck. He clung to it like goddamn Spider-Man.

“Ten pounds of feral in a five pound bag,” Quinlan Vos liked to say when describing Obi-Wan to strangers. _That,_ thought Anakin, _is underselling it._

Wide-eyed, he watched as Obi-Wan hauled Little Opress towards him and hooked his free arm around his neck. He started untangling the rigging that had gotten wrapped around Little Opress’s other arm. Anakin could barely see it in the dark but he knew it was probably covered in blood.

Ahead of him, Māhoe was keeping pace with the truck. Anakin could see him gesturing occasionally, which he assumed was towards the truck driver, trying to get the man to back off. From where he was, Anakin couldn’t quite see the driver anymore. He hoped he had run out of bullets.

What felt like hours later but was probably less than a minute, Obi-Wan had Little Opress free. Māhoe swung his Impreza closer again and opened the passenger door. Obi-Wan tossed Little Opress through the open door with both impressive aim and upper body strength. Anakin knew the guy was ripped — he’d seen Obi-Wan hauling tires and engine blocks, and of course he apparently kept in top bare knuckle boxing shape, just in case he needed to break a homophobe’s knees — but he had to also be running on pure adrenaline now. Anakin knew he himself was: his hands were trembling against the wheel.

In the distance, Anakin could hear sirens.

Obi-Wan watched as Little Opress was pulled fully into the car by Māhoe and began to angle his own body to jump back into the Impreza.

In the cab of the truck, the driver had apparently just been reloading his .45. He pointed it at Obi-Wan.

He flattened himself against the truck, holding on with one hand, and the shot went instead towards the Impreza. Māhoe swerved wildly and ended up careening off the road. The driver leaned out the window, trying to get a bead on Obi-Wan.

“Anakin!” he shouted, and Anakin didn’t need to be called for twice. He hit the accelerator and got himself next to Obi-Wan and the truck.

Looking once at the driver, Obi-Wan turned back to Anakin, flashed him that glare again, and, before Anakin could even entertain the idea of opening the door as Māhoe had done, Obi-Wan was launching himself back off the truck and onto the Civic. He impacted with a heavy thud and a grunt.

The driver aimed the .45 at them.

“Go!” Obi-Wan said.

“Hang on!” shouted Anakin and slammed on the breaks, dropping them back behind the truck. Anakin looked over to check that Obi-Wan was still hanging on — he was, one arm hooked into the open sunroof, mouth drawn in a grimace, and his eyes shut — and swung the Civic over onto the shoulder. Out before them, the truck kept driving.

As soon as the car stopped moving, Obi-Wan slid from his precarious position against the roof, and was on the ground. Anakin put the car in park on autopilot and was out of driver’s seat in seconds, not bothering to turn the thing off.

Obi-Wan leaned up against the passenger side door, left arm held awkwardly across his chest and legs kicked out in the dirt. There was blood across the front of his shirt, and Anakin hoped like hell it was from Little Opress. Anakin knelt on the ground in front of him.

“Hey,” he said. The sirens grew closer, and one black and white whipped past them, vibrating the car and the earth.

“Anakin,” he said.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Obi-Wan stared at him.

“Okay, that was a dumb question,” Anakin said. “How bad are you hurt? Did he get you?”

“No,” he said but, before he would continue, the sirens were upon them.

Anakin looked over his shoulder. A veritable fleet of police cruisers had descended on them, circling around them on the dusty shoulder of the highway. Someone was throwing down flares on the road, bright against the descending night. In the distance behind them, a cop was pulling Ventress out of her car, and Big Opress was getting loaded into an ambulance. Out in front of them, some miles ahead, the truck had slowed to a stop and cops were surrounding it too. Sheelal was probably long gone, headed towards the border or something.

He turned back to Obi-Wan, still leaned up against the Civic, his arm press tight to his chest, looking like absolute shit. Anakin felt shame swell in his chest, and regret.

“This is all my fault,” he said.

“Anakin,” said Obi-Wan again.

“No,” he said. “No, it fucking is, Obi-Wan. This is all my goddamn fault, and I know it, I know it is. And you’re hurt, and I’m so sorry —”

Behind them, the ground crunched under someone’s feet, moving quickly towards them. Anakin stared at Obi-Wan, trying to hold his eyes, to make him understand what he meant, how sorry he was, and then Māhoe was there, holding that big emergency kit of his. His face was drawn, strained. He kneeled down in the dirt before Obi-Wan, reaching one hand out towards his awkwardly held arm. 

“It’s broken,” Obi-Wan said. He wouldn’t look at Māhoe, instead staring determinedly into the middle distance. He continued, in a flat, impersonal voice, “But I’ll be perfectly fine, Jango, thank you.”

Māhoe flinched like he’d been slapped. He stood up, staring at Obi-Wan with a sort of heartbroken look on his face. “Obi-Wan —”

Anakin stood up too, confused, and someone snagged his arm. He looked over his shoulder wildly, about ready to throw a punch, when he saw it was a uniform. Anakin froze, which was enough for the guy to get him up against the door of the Civic and start cuffing him.

“Hey, fuck you,” said Anakin. “What the hell?”

“We’re taking you in for questioning,” the cop said.

“Yeah, so, like, why the cuffs, man,” he said.

Māhoe stepped into Anakin’s peripherals, one hand on the uniform’s shoulder. He said, “Hey, that’s not necessary, they didn’t do anything.”

“We’re taking them in for questioning,” the cop repeated. Another uniformed officer came over and pulled Anakin away from the first and began to march him towards a black and white, and Anakin looked over his shoulder, trying to figure out what was happening. Māhoe was frowning thunderously at the first cop, his arms crossed over his chest now.

Blood was smeared on his arms, Anakin realized. For the first time since they’d pulled over, he thought about Little Opress. Where was he? Was he okay? His arm had been caught in all the cable, and he’d almost definitely been shot by the driver.

“They were with me,” Māhoe was saying to the cop. “We were going to dinner when I got the call.”

“Hey,” Anakin started, pulling against the grip the uniform had in him. “Māhoe, where’s Little Opress? Is he okay?”

“He'll be fine, Skywalker, they’re taking him and his brother to the hospital before they book them,” he said, waving him off to continue talking to the cop.

What the hell was going on?

The uniform that had Anakin began pulling him away again, towards a black and white. From the corner of his eye, he saw another cop duck down towards Obi-Wan. He grabbed Obi-Wan by the biceps and hauled him up from the dirt, jerking him as he went, and Obi-Wan’s face pinched. He hissed a little and tried to shy away from the hands on him but the cop just grabbed him tighter.

Anakin was shaking with adrenaline and he was exhausted and freaked out. His hands were behind his back, and the cop had one hand on Anakin’s shoulder and the other on his forearm, but he was fully prepared not to let that stop him. He was going to go absolutely apeshit.

“Motherfucker,” he began but then Māhoe was turning around from where he’d been arguing with that first cop still.

“Hey,” he snapped, taking a threatening step forward. “Careful. His arm’s fucking broken.”

“Sorry, Detective Fett,” said the cop, not sounding particularly sorry at all.

Anakin’s brain shorted out.

“Fucking,” he said. “Fucking _what?”_

Someone shoved him into the black and white. His head just barely missed getting slammed off the frame. At the other door, the cop did the same with Obi-Wan, who couldn’t hide his flinch.

“Hey!” said Māhoe — _Fett?_ — again, even sharper, getting between the uniformed officer and Obi-Wan.

“What is happening?” demanded Anakin. He leaned forward to shout past Obi-Wan through the open door. “What the _fuck_ is happening?”

“It appears,” said Obi-Wan tiredly, “that our friend Jango Māhoe was actually an undercover cop.”

The cops separated them as soon as they got to the precinct back in downtown LA: Anakin to one interrogation room and Obi-Wan to another. They didn’t even offer them a phone call, let alone medical attention for Obi-Wan’s clearly broken arm and probably also broken ribs from his impact first with the truck and then with the Civic.

Anakin, handcuffed to the interrogation table, glared at the one-way mirror and desperately tried to remember any of the shit Padmé would say when they’d get stoned and watch _Law and Order_ reruns on USA.

They left him alone for a full hour. He shifted in his seat, still glaring at the mirror, occasionally looking towards the door to the room when he saw movement going past the little window. He wondered about Little Opress again, if he was okay, and he wondered if they’d sent a nurse or anything to Obi-Wan. The longer he went without getting his arm set, the worse it was going to be when they did it. He wished they hadn’t taken his phone. He wanted to call Windu.

Eventually, some guy in a shitty suit opened his door. Anakin sat straight up, cuffed hands jerking against the table, and he lifted his chin.

“So am I going to get a call or what?” he said. “Feels sort of like maybe you’re violating my constitutional rights, bro.”

The cop rolled his eyes and opposite him at the interrogation table, dropping a recording device and a yellow legal pad in front of himself. He leaned back in the chair and said, “You haven’t been arrested.”

Anakin looked pointedly to his cuffed hands.

“You haven’t been arrested,” repeated the cop. “I’m just here to take your statement and make sure it matches with Kenobi’s.”

 _Well, that’s me fucked then,_ he thought. He took a deep breath.

The door to the little room opened again and Māhoe — Fett, _Detective_ Fett, what the absolute fuck — ducked his head around the frame before entering, leaning up against the wall with the one-way glass. The other cop had either the choice to turn his back to Anakin to look at Fett or to keep facing forward and trying to intimidate Anakin. He could see the hesitation on his face but he ended up not moving from where he was.

“Don’t mind me,” Fett was saying. “I’m just here to observe. Like I said, Skywalker and Kenobi and I were going to grab dinner when I got the call. It was either break my cover or not get to the heist in time, and I had to call an audible. Broke the case, didn’t I?”

The uniform didn’t say anything.

“Skywalker and Kenobi were integral to bringing these assholes down,” he said. He still sounded like Māhoe, Anakin thought distantly. How much of the past six months had been a lie? They’d let this asshole into their lives, joked with him and been friends with him and told him about their families and histories, and, Christ, had he even been into Obi-Wan? Had he just used him? Had this cop fucked Anakin’s brother to get info from him, because he thought they were the ones who were behind the heists?

Anakin felt anger starting to overcome the shame and guilt. He wanted to break Detective Jango Fett’s face against the one-way glass. Motherfucker was lucky he was cuffed to this table because Anakin was about ready to launch himself across the tiny room and start throwing punches.

Fett was still talking. “Isn’t that right, Skywalker?” 

“Yep,” said Anakin, tight.

“Well, lets get it down then.” The cop flicked on the recorder. “This is Lieutenant Wullf Yularen, taking the statement of Anakin Skywalker on the eighteenth of November, twenty-nineteen. Also present is Detective Jango Fett. Now, Mister Skywalker, in your own words, please tell us what happened earlier this evening.”

From the wall, Fett stared at him.

Anakin tightened his jaw, leaned forward, and said, “Māhoe — Fett — was taking me and my brother Obi-Wan out to dinner when he got a call on his cell. He told us he was an undercover cop, had to go stop a crime, and we had to come with him.”

He continued telling the cop an edited version of what had happened, Fett nodding minutely here and there in the corner of Anakin’s vision. He stuck as close to the truth as he could but changed details here and there, protecting both himself and Obi-Wan.

Right as he finished up, Yularen asking one or two questions here and there, someone knocked on the door. A uniformed cop stuck his head in.

“There’s a lawyer here for Skywalker and Kenobi,” he said.

Yularen started in his seat. Anakin frowned and glanced up at Fett, whose face was as impassive as it ever had been back at the shop. He winked at Anakin and looked back at the uniform.

“Let ‘em in,” he said.

Yularen finally looked over his shoulder at Fett. He glared and returned to the recorder. He said, “This concludes the statement of Anakin Skywalker,” and flicked the recorder off.

The uniformed cop at the door stepped back, opening the door wide, and Padmé strode in. By Anakin’s internal clock, it was closer to dawn than it was to midnight but she was immaculate: dressed in one of the fancy suits she wore to mock trial and job interviews, white silk blouse with a giant bow at her neck, her hair done up intricately, and her make-up immaculate, she looked furious and fly as hell. She was clutching the nice briefcase he’d saved up for months to get her for her birthday last year.

“Excuse me,” she said as Yularen stared at her. “Is my client under arrest?”

“No,” he said. “Miss —?”

“Counseller Amidala,” she said, sharp. “If my client is not under arrest, as you said, then I would appreciate it if you removed those handcuffs before I decide to get your badge number and file a complaint with your union rep for unlawfully restraining a witness.”

Yularen nodded to the uniform, who stepped forward to undo Anakin’s cuffs. He shook his wrists out, glaring.

“I understand you’ve just wrapped up taking Mister Skywalker’s, and Mister Kenobi’s, statements,” Padmé continued, “so if you don’t mind, I would like to collect my clients and leave.”

“Of course,” said Yularen. “We’ll be in contact with you, Mister Skywalker, if we have any further questions.”

“You can direct those to me,” interjected Padmé coolly. “Mister Skywalker, if you would.”

Anakin didn’t need to be told twice. He rose from the table, straightening himself to his full, intimidating height and glared down at the assembled cops before following Padmé out into the hall. She swept past even more cops to another door, which a uniform opened immediately for her. Padmé inhaled sharply and Anakin looked over her shoulder, into the room.

Obi-Wan was sitting behind an interrogation table just as Anakin had been, and handcuffed to it as well. His face was chalk white with pain, blood all over his shirt and his outstretched left forearm was crooked in a completely unnatural way. Anakin had to dig his nails into his palms to keep from absolutely losing it.

“Release him,” said Padmé in the same cool voice she’d used earlier. It was trembling slightly as she continued, “before I start taking pictures of Mister Kenobi’s clearly broken arm that has received zero medical attention, and that I don’t completely believe he sustained prior to his arrest.”

The uniform that had let them in scrambled to comply. Despite being clearly in an insane amount of pain, Obi-Wan rose gracefully from the table and joined them at the door. Padmé put a hand on his good arm and steered him out silently, Anakin pressing his body behind them as close as he could.

“Not that I am not exceedingly grateful, Miss Amidala, dear,” Obi-Wan said in a tightly controlled voice, “but how, may I ask, did you know Anakin and I had needed up under the tender mercy of Los Angeles’s finest?”

“Sabé,” she said, “has an ex-girlfriend in the public defender’s office. She got a text from some uniformed officer she knew, who’d heard somehow, and she reached out to Sabé, who texted me.”

“Well,” he said as they made their way through the precinct. “I must remember to send her a very nice bottle of wine.”

“Padmé,” started Anakin.

She looked over her shoulder at him with an unreadable look on her face. “We’ll talk about how exactly you both ended up here later,” she told him. “Right now I want to get you both out of here, and Obi-Wan to a doctor. And then probably get a class action lawsuit started, but that can wait a bit, I think.”

Obi-Wan managed a tired, dry chuckle. “Indeed.”

They were nearly out the front door, Padmé signing some paperwork at the front desk to finish getting them out, when Fett’s voice called out Obi-Wan’s name behind them. His shoulders stiffened and Anakin crowded a little closer to his foster brother, turning his head to glare at Fett.

“Can we help you, Detective Fett?” Anakin asked.

Fett took a step closer. His face was still carefully devoid of emotion but his eyes were as bright as they had been when Obi-Wan had flinched away from his touch as they sat in the dirt beside the Civic earlier that night.

“Obi-Wan,” he said again.

Padmé handed the paperwork back to the desk officer, took the two bags of belongings they’d taken off Anakin and Obi-Wan, and looked at Fett. Her eyes flicked quickly between him, Anakin and the snarl he knew was on his face, and Obi-Wan, who was looking at the floor.

“Detective Fett,” she echoed, slowly, testing. “As I told that other detective in the room, if you have any further questions for Mister Kenobi, you’ll have to go through me — and the proper channels — in the future.”

Something in Fett’s face cracked open as Anakin watched, raw and hurt, but then it was gone, back to blank impassivity and stoicism. He nodded at Padmé and said, “Of course. I just want to apologize for the evening not going to plan.”

Anakin snorted.

“Anakin,” said Obi-Wan very quietly, and he turned immediately away from Fett back to him. He was still watching the floor. He said, “My arm hurts.”

“Let’s get out of here then,” said Anakin, looking up at Padmé. She nodded and took Obi-Wan’s good arm again, leading him out of the precinct. Anakin followed behind, not looking back as they left. He could feel Fett’s eyes on them.

Padmé led Obi-Wan towards where she had parked her Chevette and bundled him into the backseat. She wordlessly offered the keys to Anakin, who slipped into the driver’s seat as she got into the passenger. He started the Chevette up and directed them out of the parking lot, out onto the surface streets of LA. It took him a moment to get his bearings — he didn’t spend much time lurking around the headquarters of the LAPD after all — but they weren’t too far from Dodger Stadium and he used that orient himself and make their way to East LA and the twenty-four hour free clinic there that Doctor Allie, one of Adi Gallia’s cousins, ran.

“Padmé,” said Obi-Wan softly from the back seat. “Could you please pass me my phone? I should call Mace.”

“Of course!” Padmé turned to the plastic bags of personal effects that she'd been handed and dug through Obi-Wan’s to hand him his phone. He swore softly.

“It’s dead,” he said.

“Let me plug it into the car charger,” she said. She opened Anakin’s bag to inspect his phone next. “Ani’s is dead too. Here, use mine.”

Padmé twisted in her seat once again, handing Obi-Wan her unlocked phone to use. Anakin watched him through the rear view as he dialed Windu’s number from memory, face pinched and bad arm cradled against his chest. He tucked Padmé’s phone between his ear and shoulder and closed his eyes as it rang.

Anakin could faintly hear Windu’s voice on the other end as he picked up, rough with sleep and almost mumbled. “Hello.”

“Hello, Mace. I’m calling from Miss Amidala’s phone as my own has died.” Obi-Wan paused then as Windu asked something Anakin couldn’t make out and said, “No, unfortunately it’s been a rather eventful evening. Anakin, what clinic are we going to?”

The “what” that Windu all but shouted came down the line so crisply that both Anakin and Padmé winced. Obi-Wan just frowned tightly and leaned back into the car seat.

“Doctor A’s,” Anakin said loudly.

“Did you hear that?” Obi-Wan asked. “Well then, there you are.” He paused again, listening to whatever Windu was saying. “No — Mace, you needn’t come down at this time of night, I suspect it’s merely a broken arm, perhaps a bruised rib —”

“Jesus Christ, son,” said Windu quite clearly, and then something that sounded like “how stupid are you boys” but Anakin couldn’t be sure.

“Yes,” said Obi-Wan slowly. “Well.”

Anakin glanced in the rear view again, trying to listen, but whatever Windu was saying to Obi-Wan was inaudible once again. After a minute, Obi-Wan softly said, “Okay, very well,” and hung up. He pulled Padmé’s phone out from where he’d wedged it and placed it, locked, in his lap. His eyes were still closed.

“I take it Mace is gonna meet us at the clinic,” said Anakin.

“Mhm.” 

“We’ll be there soon,” he said.

“Mhm.”

He eyed Obi-Wan carefully in the rear view, but he just sat there, face pinched and closed off. He was breathing carefully through his mouth, lips parted slightly. Anakin glanced at Padmé in the passenger seat; she was frowning out the window. He turned back to the road and concentrated on getting the three of them and the Chevette to the walk-in clinic.

They got to East LA in decent time. Three a.m. was occasionally a real sweet spot in LA traffic: a little too late for parties, a little too earlier for work. You still had plenty of people on the main arteries but it wasn’t the mad, bumper to bumper crush of cars and people that Anakin had grown up amongst.

Doctor Allie was waiting outside for them when Anakin parked in the little lot at the back of the clinic she had fought tooth and nail to protect for her patients so they wouldn’t have to pay for parking at a structure. She was frowning and already making her way to the side of the car as he turned the Chevette off. Anakin suspected that she’d gotten a phone call from Windu as soon as he’d hung up with Obi-Wan to rouse her and let her know her favorite problem patient was coming in hot for a visit.

As it was, she just sighed heavily as she helped Obi-Wan out of the backseat, offering a quick greeting to Anakin and Padmé before she was hustling him in through the clinic doors.

Anakin watched them go, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“Do you want to go in with him?” asked Padmé. She was typing at a truly impressive clip on the phone she’d retrieved from Obi-Wan. Anakin glanced at the screen, caught the name of the chat — BITCHES GET SHIT DONE — the phrase _police brutality,_ and Obi-Wan’s name and decided he didn’t want to know.

“No,” he said. “He’s probably already horrified I saw him like this. He wouldn’t want me to watch him get his arm set on top of that. Anyway, Windu will be here soon and he’ll bully him enough for both of us.”

“Okay,” she said. She finished her text, locked her phone, and sat down on the back stoop leading into the clinic.

“You’re gonna get your pants all dirty,” Anakin said. He didn’t know what else to say.

“I’ll dry clean it,” she told him. She stared up at him. “Anakin.”

He dropped down next to her and put his head in his hands. “I fucked up so bad tonight, Padmé. I don’t even — I don’t even know where to start.”

“Maybe with the illegal street races?”

Anakin looked up so fast he thought he heard something pop in his neck. “What?”

She looked at him. “Anakin,” she said again. “I am a very smart woman. I know you. I listen to you. I visit you at your shop. I’m Instagram friends with your brother, Ahsoka, _and_ Quinlan Vos. Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Or at the very least get kind of an idea of what was going on?”

He shrugged, helpless.

“Oh, Ani,” Padmé sighed. “I love you but sometimes you are an absolute moron.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That tracks.”

“I’ve known about the street racing,” she said, “since about six months after we started dating. I was just waiting for you to tell me.”

“I didn’t know how,” he said. “It seemed like — I don’t know. You’re so perfect, Padmé, and you believe in the law and you want to change the world and I drag race in the street. I didn’t want to lose you.”

“I’m not perfect,” said Padmé. “And I _don’t_ believe in the law. That’s why I’m doing it, because I want to change the system and protect people, the way the law should but doesn’t. I don’t care that you street race. It scares me, of course, because I don’t want you to get hurt. But you’re so smart too, Ani, and I know you make your car as safe and good as you can. I just wish you’d share it with me, so I didn’t have to pretend to not be worried when I am. So I don’t have to worry about whether or not you’ll come home tonight — I can be there with you.”

Anakin chewed on the side of his thumb. He said, “I started when I was fourteen. My mom absolutely lost her mind.”

“Of course she did,” said Padmé. “Fourteen? You didn’t even have a learner’s permit!”

“No,” he said. “I totally deserved it for sure. But I’d grown up around these guys and the culture, and it was like, why shouldn’t I? And Mom worked for Windu, who was one of the greatest street racers ever, and Obi-Wan was a genius mechanic. It just made sense that it would be my life.”

He stretched his legs out over the pavement and glanced at Padmé. She was watching him, and she didn’t look upset or mad; she just looked like she was waiting for him. _Okay,_ he thought, _okay,_ and he told her everything.

Halfway through, Windu pulled into the lot in his gunmetal grey ‘71 Chevy Chevelle SS. He walked passed them quickly, giving Padmé a nod and a tight smile and dropping his hand onto the top of Anakin’s head, like he used to do when Anakin was a boy and only came up to his hip. He didn’t say anything, obviously too worried about Obi-Wan, but Anakin was already bracing himself for later, when he’d have to tell them the same story he was telling Padmé: how he’d given the plans to Palpatine, and how it was all his fault.

“You couldn’t have known,” said Padmé when he finished. “You were sixteen, and your mom had just passed away. He took advantage of you.”

“But I should have trusted Obi-Wan and Mace,” he said. It was a truth that had been churning in his gut all these months: he should have trusted the people who had proven that they loved and cared for him, even if he didn’t want it to be them, even if he resented them for something that was never their fault. They’d shown Anakin, time and again when he was little, that they would do anything to protect them, and he pretty much told them “fuck you” straight to their faces.

“Yes,” she agreed. “You should have. But you know now. And you had been trying to fix things. You did a pretty terrible job at it, I won’t lie to you, Ani, but you tried.”

He snorted a laugh. “Yeah, I really could not maintain control of that situation. I’m not sure how it could have gone worse.”

“Well, Māhoe — Detective Fett — could have told the truth,” Padmé said, “and you could actually be in jail for the heist.”

“Fuck that guy,” Anakin said, almost reflexively. “That asshole. I’m gonna kill him. So what if he helped me? He lied to us. He lied to Obi-Wan.”

She looked at him from the corner of her eye. “So did you.”

“I didn’t,” he started and then blew out a huge breath. “Fuck. Yeah. And I’m going to make up for it, Padmé. I’m going to make it up to you and Obi-Wan and Windu, and everyone else. I’ll clean up my mess. I promise.”

“I know you will,” she said. “I’ll help you, as much as I can.”

Padmé twined her fingers with his and Anakin let out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding. They sat there, holding hands on the curb outside the clinic, in silence, for a long time.

“Do you think he’ll be all right?” she asked eventually. “Obi-Wan, I mean.”

“Yeah,” said Anakin with a shrug. He felt a little bit like he could cry but bit his lip instead. “Yeah, I mean, he always is, in the end.”

Padmé nodded and they sat there, hand in hand, legs pressed together, silently staring out into the parking lot. The sun was coming up, and it was a new day. _And maybe everything,_ Anakin thought, _is really going to be okay._

**Author's Note:**

> \- another installment of this very silly fast + furious au; thank you to everyone who read + commented on the first part + said they’d be down to read more!!  
> \- there’s at least one more story in this au currently being planned — one from obi-wan’s perspective (+ which will be more heavily jango/obi-wan)  
> \- i’m on tumblr as greatunironic  
> \- title + epigraph from bruce springsteen’s “racing in the street”


End file.
